Steam - 2020 Year in Review
As we put 2020 behind us, we'd like to review and share some of the more noteworthy updates, features, and events that happened last year. This is our third "Year in Review" blog post, so presumably you're used to the format by now (i.e. this is long and we hope you read it). If you're a new developer to Steam, feel free to check out the previous entries for 2018 and 2019 for things you may have missed.
As many of you already know, this past year had more than its share of challenges, with everyone's lives upended by the global pandemic. While Steam was already seeing significant growth in 2020 before COVID-19 lockdowns, video game playtime surged when people started staying home, dramatically increasing the number of customers buying and playing games, and hopefully bringing some joy to counter-balance some of the craziness that was 2020. This has led to new highs for monthly active users (120.4 million), daily active users (62.6 million), peak concurrent users (24.8 million), first-time purchasers (2.6 million per month), hours of playtime (31.3 billion hours), and the number of games purchased (21.4% increase over 2019).
The Store
Throughout 2020 we hosted a number of big seasonal sales and events, including the Lunar New Year Sale, the Spring Cleaning Event, the Summer Sale, the Halloween Sale, the Autumn Sale, the Winter Sale, and the 2020 Steam Awards. Notably, the largest seasonal sales of the year (Summer, Autumn, Winter) were record breaking in terms of revenue generated for developers and publishers, something we touched on in our recap of the Autumn Sale. But it wasn't all going to the top-end: for example, there was a 36% increase in the number of games that grossed over $100k from the 2019 Winter Sale to the 2020 Winter Sale.
In addition to these sales, we focused a lot of our energy last year providing opportunities for visibility to games throughout the catalog. We built tools that make it easier to host official themed sales and special events, as well as support the multitude of conferences, conventions, and game festivals organized by teams outside of Steam. With various industry conventions cancelled, it became increasingly important for developers to have more ways to get their products in front of potential customers.
With this in mind, we took what we learned from our collaboration with Geoff Keighley and the Game Awards Festival in December 2019, and organized the Steam Game Festival: Spring Edition. Player interest from that event was promising (559k demo activations for only a few dozen demos), so we hosted a bigger and better Steam Game Festival: Summer Edition, which included over 900 demos, livestreams, and developer interviews. This led to some awesome numbers: 4 million customers from 202 countries downloaded at least one demo, total wishlist numbers increased an average of 82%, millions of people watched the livestreams, and the developer spotlight videos received hundreds of thousands of views. Following on the success of that event, the Steam Game Festival: Autumn Edition resulted in 5.1 million demo activations.
The investment in these sales & events tools also enabled us to more easily organize and host themed sales, including the Tower Defense Sale, the Steam Digital Table Top Fest and the Fighting Game Sale. We were also able to host sale and event destinations for various conferences and conventions from around the globe, including PAX Online, Gamescom, Tokyo Game Show, PC Gaming Show, and many more. We look forward to collaborating with organizations to bring even more community events to life this year through Steam.
Steam Labs continues to be a place where users help us iterate on new features for Steam. This feedback process has been invaluable as it helps the team figure out what works and what doesn’t. In February, experiment 008 - Play Next was introduced to help users discover games within their existing libraries. Utilizing the same machine learning technology that powers the Interactive Recommender (which graduated in March), this experiment quickly proved its worth and became a permanent feature in the Steam Library. Also in February, another experiment, 004 - Search made it out to the broader userbase and got its own mini-update with Query Expansion. Experiment 006 - Community Recommendations shipped to all users on the anniversary of Steam Labs in July.
While not all experiments were successful enough to graduate out of the Labs, we leveraged our learnings from some, like Deep Dive, to build out experiments 010 - Browsing Steam and 012 - Exploring Sales. These new experiments provide users more powerful and intuitive ways to explore the Steam catalog via user tags.
In 2020 we launched the Steam Points program, a set of features that rewards users for buying games and engaging with the Steam Community. Initially, these features were only available during sale events, starting with the Lunar New Year Sale in 2019, but it became clear that customers really wanted them year-round. So with the start of the 2020 Summer Sale, these features became a permanent fixture on the Store. Now users can redeem their Steam Points for items to decorate their profile (e.g. animated backgrounds & avatars, avatar frames, etc.), use in chat (stickers & effects), or reward other users for creating great content, anytime they want. As a result, demand for fresh content increased, so we introduced new items and types of Community Awards in September. In early December, the Points Shop developer tools were made available, which allowed developers to create their own game-specific items for their customers. And with the Winter Sale, we added some features that gave users new ways to customize their profiles, interact with friends in chat, and recognize others with Community Awards for helpful discussion posts or cool Steam profiles. Thus far, 15.5 million users have redeemed their points for 99 million items. And over 2 million users have granted 7 million Community Awards to their fellow community members.
Steam has supported monthly subscriptions for individual games for a while now, but to support Electronic Arts bringing their catalog back to Steam, we've expanded on that functionality. With EA Play on Steam, users can purchase unlimited access to many of EA's top titles. This membership also allows players to try EA's new releases for up to 10 hours (a feature called timed trials), with the option to purchase them at a discount. We're excited about the possibilities here and look forward to seeing what other developers would like to do with this capability.
The Steam Community
Players interact with each other in many ways inside and outside of games, and while the vast majority of these interactions are positive, some are not. Steam Discussions are already managed by a full-time moderation team, but chat has always been a difficult area to moderate in real-time. So as a test, Steam Labs experiment 011 - Chat Filtering attempted to mitigate some of the toxic language that users encounter in chat. After iterating on the feature with both players and developers, the feature (which players can opt-out of) launched for everyone in October. If you'd like to use these features in your games, take a look at the documentation for the Steamworks API.
In March, we rolled out a system that automatically analyzes user reviews for malicious text. Since then, we've expanded its scope to cover areas like discussions, comments, user-generated content, etc, because bad actors will take advantage of any and all of Steam's input fields to misdirect users and lure them to websites with the false promise of free items or whatnot. Typically, these websites ask for account credentials or entice the users to download what inevitably ends up being malware, at which point the Steam accounts are compromised and all sorts of terrible things can happen. This behavior has unfortunately led to a proliferation of scam reviews, forum posts, comments, Workshop items, etc. that have crowded out genuine discussion and real content that players actually care about. To combat this, before user-entered text is made visible to anyone, our system runs it through a NLP machine learning model and flags it for further review if necessary. As a result, we've seen a huge decrease in scam user reviews, discussions, and comments. The battle against bad actors is never-ending, of course, but the successes we're seeing gives us some confidence that we can leverage this tech in other areas on Steam.
Experiment 009 - The News Hub entered Steam Labs in March and gave players a centralized place to discover events, news, and activities for their games. Building upon the Events & Announcements feature that shipped in September 2019, the team felt that users could really benefit from having one place to see all the latest happenings for their games. Now users can easily see live or upcoming events and plan accordingly, and, of course, read any patch notes, updates, or announcements for games they are interested in. The News Hub also replaced the old syndicated news feed (which only supported a handful of sites) with a more flexible framework that pulls in articles from dozens of external news sources around the world, with more being added all the time. After lots of feedback and iteration, the News Hub graduated out of Labs in December.
VR Gaming on PCs has continued to show growth in 2020 with game sales up 32% year-over-year. That's not even counting the launch of Half-Life: Alyx, which added an additional 39% on top of that. Demand for PC VR is strong and growing as more than 1.7 million users on Steam experienced VR games for the first time in 2020. Concurrently, Valve Index hardware demand was consistently high with inventory catching up toward the end of 2020. VR users have enjoyed over 104 million PC VR sessions last year, with each session averaging about 32 minutes, culminating in a 30% increase in total playtime.
To support all these users, SteamVR has been continually upgraded throughout the year with dozens of point releases. The most notable updates featured an all new Dashboard and expanded support for OpenXR, which makes it easier for developers to have their games work on all supported headsets by writing to just one API.
More and more people are choosing to play their Steam games with a controller. To date, there have been 46.6 million users who have used a controller–as a comparison, at the end of 2019 there were 31.8 million users. Last year, there were 1.68 billion game sessions where a controller was used, a 66.6% increase from the 1.01 billion sessions in 2019. And of these sessions in 2020, 452 million were in games that integrated with Steam Input, up from the 232 million the previous year. If you leverage Steam Input for your games, you'll get support for hundreds of devices out of the box. And we'll do the work for you when new controllers come out, like when we added support for PS5 and Xbox Series X controllers.
We also saw an increase in developers engaging with Valve for early Proton testing during their game development, and fixing Proton-specific issues post-release. All in all, this resulted in exciting new releases this year such as DEATH STRANDING, Horizon: Zero Dawn, and Cyberpunk 2077 being playable on Linux at or shortly after release.
In order to keep developers informed of all the Steamworks happenings, we published Winter and Spring/Summer recaps. Here are some notable highlights from those posts, as well as some other announcements you may have missed:
- Share Application Management Access - Share management of your application with others outside your organization.
- Data Deep Dive - Read a blog post that goes into detail about how new releases are performing on Steam.
- Traffic Reports Update - Learn about fixes and updates to our popular navigation traffic tools.
- Steamworks Tag Wizard - Use this tool to tag your games appropriately, since we're leaning on them more in features like the themed sales mentioned above.
- Steam Playtest - Utilize a new feature that lets you manage beta testers, all on Steam.
Behind the Scenes
The enormous increase in the number of people buying and playing games is a good problem for us to have--one that kept our operations teams busy managing the increased demand on our servers and network infrastructure. At the start of March, there was a 30-40% increase in total traffic related to game downloads; this is less than the bump we usually see during a sale, so it was fairly easily handled. In combination with one of the biggest launches of the year in Cyberpunk 2077, we hit a record for download traffic of 52 Tbps (26 Tbps just for the preload period alone), which doubled our previous peak. In spite of the lockdowns, we still managed to completely upgrade 1 of our network sites (Chicago), and add 3 new sites (Frankfurt, Dallas, Buenos Aires), with at least another 2-4 in the pipeline for the first half of 2021.
An interesting note: various countries' government bodies approached us and other large Internet companies to see how we could help mitigate the rise in global traffic that ISPs were seeing, because it was getting to a point where it was affecting people's ability to work from home and their children's remote schooling. In response, we made some changes to help manage the bandwidth during work and school hours, and to defer updates to the evenings.
Our support teams around the world also faced new challenges, with most agents transitioning to working remotely outside of their offices when lockdowns went into effect. In total the support team handled 13 million support tickets (excluding refund requests), which is 5% more than 2019 and nearly double the 7.7 million tickets in 2017. Our support team also continued to grow, which led to improved coverage of supported languages on Steam, and increased availability in all time zones. Even with the increase in tickets and other logistical challenges associated with working from home, wait times haven't really increased (beyond the expected spikes around sales)–you can view the stats here.
Being unable to travel to meet with partners has most assuredly made it harder for us to communicate with developers and keep our finger on the pulse on what matters to you. We've tried a variety of ways to stay involved with the game dev community, including sponsoring and participating (virtually) in the Indie Arena Booth Online at GamesCom, the Game Devs of Color Expo, GirlGeekCONLINE, etc. We also hosted a dozen virtual developer chat sessions throughout the year with help from various game dev incubators, associations, and conferences: this included groups from Game Republic UK, LevelUp in Malaysia, Boston area devs, Dev.Play in Romania, the Dutch Game Garden, Pro Chile, GameBCN in Barcelona, the Montreal GamePlay Space, and a couple other groups.
We've also posted numerous videos throughout the year, such as a walkthrough of the new Events & Announcement tools, a deep dive into how the Steam Front Page works, and Steamworks Quick Tips Videos. We know it's not the same as being able to interact with game devs in person, so we really look forward to the day when we can see you again at GDC and other conferences around the world.
We rewrote our video processing pipeline for game trailers in 2020 to support the steady increase of video uploads over the last few years and support new video codecs. This growth has come from both new game release as well as developers taking advantage of the ability to update their game trailers for incremental updates and special events. As a result, partners should see shorter video conversion delays and users should see higher fidelity videos.
While many of the projects we planned to ship in 2020 did, in fact, ship, dealing with an ongoing pandemic shifted some of our priorities throughout the year. This inevitably meant that some of the planned projects had to take a backseat to managing the increased traffic and demand from the additional millions of users on Steam. However, we still think it's useful for us to talk publicly about some of the projects we want to push forward in 2021.
- Steam China - Together with our partner Perfect World, the team has been hard at work, and we're really close to launching this program to bring Steam onshore into China in early 2021.
- User Experience Improvements - We're looking at filing down the rough edges that most
users encounter when interacting with Steam–basically, we want to make it as easy as possible to buy, install, and play games. - Steam Login - We still plan on refreshing the Steam Mobile app and making it easier for users to login and keep their accounts secure.
- The Steam Points program - We're brainstorming more ways to reward users, including folks who aren't especially interested in Steam Community features.
- Linux - We're continuing to invest in technology that improves game compatibility and performance through Steam Play. We're also putting together new ways for prospective users to get into Linux gaming and experience these improvements.
- Steam Labs - Along with iterating on existing experiments, such as 010 - Browse and 012 - Exploring Sales, we're exploring new ways for players to browse the catalog in the coming year.
There's plenty more that we're working on that we can't talk about publicly just yet. Have ideas for what we could do that would positively affect your experience on Steam, either as a developer or a player? Please send us your feedback! And if any of the problems we deal with sound interesting to you, we'd love to talk to you--after all, we're always hiring.
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