Valve’s Steam year in review shows PC gaming on the rise – and VR, too

Valve is doing its part to illustrate the game’s growth last year with its Steam 2020 Year in Review report. It includes some pretty impressive numbers, like the fact that PC gamers increased their game time by over 50% last year, and that each month, 2.6 million people bought a game on Steam for the first time.

2020 has been a tough year, and many of us have used the game to escape the horror of all that is going on in the world – a goal aided by the fact that so many great games have been released in the year. last. Over half of Americans played video games in 2020, and while Steam’s numbers only represent the PC (and don’t count games like Fortnite that appear on competing PC stores), it is always a testament to the fact that PC gaming is not just surviving, but thriving.

Image: Valve

In addition to the extra time spent playing and newcomers to the platform, data from Steam also shows that the number of games sold increased by 21.4% and the platform had up to 24.8. millions of people playing at once, setting a new simultaneous game record. players for the second time this year.

2020 was also the year that Valve Half-life: Alyx came out, which we hoped could finally be a killer app for VR, a game that would finally get people to try VR. Do the Steam figures confirm this? Well, VR has certainly increased, with 1.7 million people using Steam’s VR interface for the first time, potentially due to new headsets that have received rave reviews, like the Oculus Quest 2. Valve also reports that there was a 71% increase in RV sales with Alyx alone, which represents 39% of them. People were also playing more in VR, with a 30% increase in game time.

Image: Valve

Speaking of PC games played outside of the traditional “mouse and keyboard attached to Windows machine” model, Valve also notes a 66.6% increase in gaming sessions played with a controller. Steam also notes its work on introducing games to Linux with its Proton runtime environment and calls Death Stranding and Cyberpunk 2077 as games available on the operating system shortly after their release on Windows.