2019 was a good year for Steam. Valve recently announced that Steam broke its previous highest concurrent player count by 260,000. Peak player counts reached 18 million players on February 2. But that’s not all, as Valve revealed some ‘trivia’ for Steam. A total of 21 billion hours were spent playing games in 2019. To put things in perspective, that’s a total of 2.4 million years. 44 review bombs were addressed and 4.3 million items were uploaded to Steam Workshop. In the last two months of 2019, Remote Play was used by 3.7 million people and Remote Play Together by 2.3 million. Valve also announced new features that will be coming this year.
Steam 2020 Features Roadmap
The following features should arrive in Steam this year:
- Data Deep Dives - We've seen a lot of analysis from third parties that have taken a stab at figuring out how games are doing on Steam (and overall health of the platform), based on the limited amount of data that is publicly available. Since we have access to more data, we thought it would be useful to do our own analysis and share the results as a multi-part series of blog posts.
- Soundtracks - We're adding new functionality to better support gaming soundtracks.
- Steam Trust - Trust (the tech behind Trust Factor Matchmaking in CS: GO) shipped in a closed beta to several partners last year and is being rolled out to all partners later this year.
- Steam PC Café Program - Launched in open beta last year to over 8 thousand sites, we're working on bringing the program to schools and libraries, along with the expected Cybercafés, PC Bangs, VR Arcades, etc.
- Steam Labs - More top-secret experiments are actively being tinkered with, and we're planning on graduating some of these features so that they are available to everyone.
- SteamVR - The team is hard at work on SteamVR 2.0, which will feature a number of customer experience improvements.
- Top Lists - We're taking what we learned from the top lists posted in Steam News this past year to develop new store destinations designed to display compelling trending content to customers.
- Steam Mobile App - The mobile app is getting a refresh to add more login types and help users secure their accounts.
- Sale Events - Building on features that first shipped in the 2019 Lunar New Year sale, we're exploring more ways to reward users for participating in sale events throughout the year.
So what do you think? How many hours did you contribute to that 21 billion mark? What features are you most looking forward to for Steam this year? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.
