Steam has 1 billion registered users and 90 million monthly active users

Obviously a lot of those registered Steam accounts would be those of bots/spam, cheaters and CSGO alt accounts. Although the 90 million monthly active users was announced back in October 2018 we got some other interesting info that hasn't been shared. Article from PCGAMESN

Steam has a billionth user. The lucky account is ‘amusedsilentdragonfly’, according to our sister site Steam ID Finder – see their ‘steamID3’, which shows as [U:1:1000000000].

Steam's Asian playerbase is now rivaling the US and Europe in size. Last year 87.5% of Steam transactions in Asia were done with non standard payment methods. While only 12.5% was done with the five standard payment methods. Steam supports over 100 different payment methods. Steam's PC Cafe Program makes it more attractive for Asian users to be willing to try as a lot of PC gaming in Asia is still done in PC cafes and it is useful for people with poor internet connections at home. 80% of Epic Game Store transactions are done with credit cards and paypal.

A lot of infrastructure work was done for Steam as well.

Lots of infrastructure work was done in 2018. For instance, we performed a significant upgrade to the Solr servers that power Store search, User Reviews, and the Steam Workshop. We continued to work on our disaster recovery plan so Steam doesn't go under if our main data center is hit by a meteorite. We deployed new SQL Servers, now with 2.7 petabytes of FAST solid state storage, to keep up with the 1.7 billion trading cards granted, the 488 million trades completed, the 245 million emoticons crafted, and the 218 million screenshots posted in the last year.

Since 2015, we have been building and operating our own global private network. We partner with Internet backbone companies around the world to build this network, which connects directly with over 28,000 regional and local networks in 28 cities in 21 different countries. This private network lets us deliver games and carry game, voice chat, and other data with high speeds and low latency to users in more than 229 countries. Our edge network capacity is now 12 Tbps, and is growing 50% year over year. We delivered over 15 exabytes (15 billion gigabytes) of data to customers in 2018. For reference, the entire traffic of the Internet in 2003 (the year we launched Steam) is estimated at 9.3 exabytes.

We improved security across the Steam websites by moving them entirely to HTTPS-only. We also launched a bug bounty program with Hackerone[hackerone.com] in May, to help mitigate and quickly address security related issues. To date, we've paid out over $471,000 to security researchers that help us keep our platform safe and secure.

In May 2017 we talked about the state of Steam Support and our efforts to improve it. At that time we made public some help request stats to hold ourselves accountable for creating a better customer support experience. In 2018 Steam Support processed over 44 million help tickets submitted by both customers and game developers. And it's not just help tickets–in 2018 our game review team processed 46,200 review requests, played 11,111 games (or DLC), and examined 17,448 store pages.

We paid nearly 10,000 partners in the last twelve months, of which 2,300 were new to our platform. We also changed the Steamworks Distribution Agreement to reward titles that hit certain revenue levels on Steam, and also to make it clear that you can share your game sales data as you see fit.

We also paid 1,668 Workshop Contributors for the ~4,700 new items that shipped in 16 different games in 2018. The Steam Workshop is now used in almost 1,000 games, with almost 3.2 million items uploaded in just the last year.

And we've racked up the frequent flier miles, traveling to over 35 cities around the globe: from Level Up![levelupkl.com] in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to Indigo[www.dutchgamegarden.nl] held by Dutch Game Garden in Utrecht, Netherlands, we've met with thousands of partners at events and conferences to answer questions and solicit feedback on the Steam platform.

There is also the plans on improving and expanding Steam features

Doing this sort of retrospective is useful to us as a team, because it helps us better understand what we've done and where we should go from here. While we feel like we've accomplished a lot in 2018, there's still a ton more work to do, features to build, and hard problems to solve. Here's a sneak peek at a few of the more notable things we plan to ship this year:

• Store Discoverability: We’re working on a new recommendation engine powered by machine-learning, that can match players to games based on their individual tastes. Algorithms are only a part of our discoverability solution, however, so we're building more broadcasting and curating features and are constantly assessing the overall design of the store.
• Steam China: We've partnered with Perfect World to bring Steam onshore into China. We'll reveal more details about this in the coming months.
• Steam Library Update: Some long awaited changes to the Steam Client will ship, including a reworked Steam Library, built on top of the technology we shipped in Steam Chat.
• New Events System: We're upgrading the events system in the Steam Community, enabling you to highlight interesting activities in your games like tournaments, streams, or weekly challenges.
• Steam TV: We're working on expanding Steam TV beyond just broadcasting specific tournaments and special events, in order to support all games.
• Steam Chat: We're going to ship a new Steam Chat mobile app, so you can share your favorite GIFs with your friends while on the go.
• Steam Trust: The technology behind Trusted Matchmaking on CS:GO is getting an upgrade and will become a full Steam feature that will be available to all games. This means you'll have more information that you can use to help determine how likely a player is a cheater or not.
• Steam PC Cafe Program: We are going to officially ship a new PC Cafe Program so that players can have a good experience using Steam in hundreds of thousands of PC Cafes Worldwide.

Seems to me that Steam has justifications for their default 30% cut. Covering all those payment methods, infrastructure and security improvements for a rapidly growing playerbase. Not to mention all the features they provide for both gamers and developers. While the Epic Store has a 12% cut there is the factor that it does not have the huge Asian gamer demographic that Steam has as the Epic Game Store is blocked in both China and South Korea which are the two largest PC gaming markets in Asia and are in the top 5 biggest gaming markets overall. The lack of different payment methods and consumers having to pay transaction fees would likely turn them away from the EGS anyway.

Most of those steam users play free 2 play cancers like dota 2.

Tencent's WeGame has 200 million users in China, last I checked. Does this mean Steam is more popular than WeGame in China?

So? I've made 5 accounts in total throughout my 12 years using Steam.

Steam is poopy as turds.

Mobile gaming master race.

So less than 1/100 who have a steam account actually use steam?

That’s horrible. It sounds like over 99% of people who make an account never use it or buy anything. What a joke.

Makes the console install bases look puny in comparison.

Only 90 million? That's not even half of xbox live.

I once met a guy that proudly declared that he had over 50 card farming accounts, so it's difficult to know how many people really are.

@Ant_17: What...

lol, less than 50m xone sold, but there are ~200m live accounts? How does that make it any better than Steam when 4-5 people are using the same console/games/live service?

I have a Steam account but have not used it in nearly a decade.

MAU's not active accounts. Learn the difference.

LMAO @ the cow that was a year or so back bragging about PSN being the largest network based on 1 outdated metric out of 3. He was told about the inaccuracy but his only defense was the article says so.

Don't think so, if we are talking about active accounts. Isn't WeGame also available for Mobile Games? The last time Steam officially reported was it had 125M+ active accounts in 2013-2014, before its breakout in China and Asia in general. It's pretty safe to say that Steam has around ~200M active accounts by now worldwide or at the very least 150M+.

@NoodleFighter said:

A lot of infrastructure work was done for Steam as well.

Thank God we don't play games off floppy disks anymore

@ButDuuude: you wouldn't be counted in those 90 million then

I enjoy the platform

They make Sheep sign up to play minecraft. They would make cows but Sony don't want crossplay for that.

And? Most are not even capable of running shit.

@mandzilla: Seeing as 1% of registered users are actually using the service, youd have problems convincing me of that....

Whoever posted this article doesn't understand anything about account generation on Steam, it's not at 1 billion, not even close. Account generation does run sequentially but it skips Steam ID's in its generation process. Your Steam 32 bit ID (U:) is a multiplication by a factor of two on your Steam2 ID. So for example if your Steam ID is STEAM_0:0:1000 your 32 bit ID would be U:2000, if your Steam ID is STEAM_0:1:1000 your 32 bit ID would be U:2001. The problem though is that not all Steam2 ID's are ever generated, there could be a STEAM_0:0:1000 and not a STEAM_0:1:1000 so the U:2001 ID wouldn't even exist.

In the case of both of the STEAM :1000 ID's neither exist, they were never generated so neither the U:2000 or U:2001 32 bit ID's were ever created. It's like this all over, there's skips and gaps in the account generation so it's probably more in the 750 million account generation range, not 1 billion.

and you play crap like Uncharted, Horizon etc.

@sealionact: Math is hard.

@ps360: Are you Ron Valencias alt?

These numbers mean shit. Last game I bought on steam was years ago.

I only game on ps4 now

1/7th the world population. But pc gaming is dead lol.

That's an enecdote. In larger terms, they mean shag all.

When f2p cancers are better than full fledged console games, yikes.

@NoodleFighter said:

Obviously a lot of those registered Steam accounts would be those of bots/spam, cheaters and CSGO alt accounts. Although the 90 million monthly active users was announced back in October 2018 we got some other interesting info that hasn't been shared. Article from PCGAMESN

Steam has a billionth user. The lucky account is ‘amusedsilentdragonfly’, according to our sister site Steam ID Finder – see their ‘steamID3’, which shows as [U:1:1000000000].

Steam's Asian playerbase is now rivaling the US and Europe in size. Last year 87.5% of Steam transactions in Asia were done with non standard payment methods. While only 12.5% was done with the five standard payment methods. Steam supports over 100 different payment methods. Steam's PC Cafe Program makes it more attractive for Asian users to be willing to try as a lot of PC gaming in Asia is still done in PC cafes and it is useful for people with poor internet connections at home. 80% of Epic Game Store transactions are done with credit cards and paypal.

A lot of infrastructure work was done for Steam as well.

Lots of infrastructure work was done in 2018. For instance, we performed a significant upgrade to the Solr servers that power Store search, User Reviews, and the Steam Workshop. We continued to work on our disaster recovery plan so Steam doesn't go under if our main data center is hit by a meteorite. We deployed new SQL Servers, now with 2.7 petabytes of FAST solid state storage, to keep up with the 1.7 billion trading cards granted, the 488 million trades completed, the 245 million emoticons crafted, and the 218 million screenshots posted in the last year.

Since 2015, we have been building and operating our own global private network. We partner with Internet backbone companies around the world to build this network, which connects directly with over 28,000 regional and local networks in 28 cities in 21 different countries. This private network lets us deliver games and carry game, voice chat, and other data with high speeds and low latency to users in more than 229 countries. Our edge network capacity is now 12 Tbps, and is growing 50% year over year. We delivered over 15 exabytes (15 billion gigabytes) of data to customers in 2018. For reference, the entire traffic of the Internet in 2003 (the year we launched Steam) is estimated at 9.3 exabytes.

We improved security across the Steam websites by moving them entirely to HTTPS-only. We also launched a bug bounty program with Hackerone[hackerone.com] in May, to help mitigate and quickly address security related issues. To date, we've paid out over $471,000 to security researchers that help us keep our platform safe and secure.

In May 2017 we talked about the state of Steam Support and our efforts to improve it. At that time we made public some help request stats to hold ourselves accountable for creating a better customer support experience. In 2018 Steam Support processed over 44 million help tickets submitted by both customers and game developers. And it's not just help tickets–in 2018 our game review team processed 46,200 review requests, played 11,111 games (or DLC), and examined 17,448 store pages.

We paid nearly 10,000 partners in the last twelve months, of which 2,300 were new to our platform. We also changed the Steamworks Distribution Agreement to reward titles that hit certain revenue levels on Steam, and also to make it clear that you can share your game sales data as you see fit.

We also paid 1,668 Workshop Contributors for the ~4,700 new items that shipped in 16 different games in 2018. The Steam Workshop is now used in almost 1,000 games, with almost 3.2 million items uploaded in just the last year.

And we've racked up the frequent flier miles, traveling to over 35 cities around the globe: from Level Up![levelupkl.com] in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to Indigo[www.dutchgamegarden.nl] held by Dutch Game Garden in Utrecht, Netherlands, we've met with thousands of partners at events and conferences to answer questions and solicit feedback on the Steam platform.

There is also the plans on improving and expanding Steam features

Doing this sort of retrospective is useful to us as a team, because it helps us better understand what we've done and where we should go from here. While we feel like we've accomplished a lot in 2018, there's still a ton more work to do, features to build, and hard problems to solve. Here's a sneak peek at a few of the more notable things we plan to ship this year:

• Store Discoverability: We’re working on a new recommendation engine powered by machine-learning, that can match players to games based on their individual tastes. Algorithms are only a part of our discoverability solution, however, so we're building more broadcasting and curating features and are constantly assessing the overall design of the store.
• Steam China: We've partnered with Perfect World to bring Steam onshore into China. We'll reveal more details about this in the coming months.
• Steam Library Update: Some long awaited changes to the Steam Client will ship, including a reworked Steam Library, built on top of the technology we shipped in Steam Chat.
• New Events System: We're upgrading the events system in the Steam Community, enabling you to highlight interesting activities in your games like tournaments, streams, or weekly challenges.
• Steam TV: We're working on expanding Steam TV beyond just broadcasting specific tournaments and special events, in order to support all games.
• Steam Chat: We're going to ship a new Steam Chat mobile app, so you can share your favorite GIFs with your friends while on the go.
• Steam Trust: The technology behind Trusted Matchmaking on CS:GO is getting an upgrade and will become a full Steam feature that will be available to all games. This means you'll have more information that you can use to help determine how likely a player is a cheater or not.
• Steam PC Cafe Program: We are going to officially ship a new PC Cafe Program so that players can have a good experience using Steam in hundreds of thousands of PC Cafes Worldwide.

Seems to me that Steam has justifications for their default 30% cut. Covering all those payment methods, infrastructure and security improvements for a rapidly growing playerbase. Not to mention all the features they provide for both gamers and developers. While the Epic Store has a 12% cut there is the factor that it does not have the huge Asian gamer demographic that Steam has as the Epic Game Store is blocked in both China and South Korea which are the two largest PC gaming markets in Asia and are in the top 5 biggest gaming markets overall. The lack of different payment methods and consumers having to pay transaction fees would likely turn them away from the EGS anyway.

Clearly it isn't worth it if you look at how the market develops.

I guess I'm not surprised.