Steam Hits a Record-Breaking 18.8m Active Users

Steam has broken a own record for connected users today, the gaming platform had a peak of 18,801,944 connected users. It is worth mentioning that Steam is referring to users that are connected to Steam, that does not means users who are actually playing a game.

@Steam has broken its record for most concurrently online users that was held for two years. Previous record was 18,537,490 users. It’s still increasing! But there’s about 1 million less players actually in-game (≈5.8mil vs ≈7mil two years ago).

This might be somewhat worrying for Steam, as Epic Games Store might be taking a chunk of the PC players, that might explained the 1 million players who are not active on 2020.

Steam is currently the largest digital distribution platform for PC gaming, By 2017, users totaled roughly US$4.3 billion in purchases, representing at least 18% of global PC game sales. The service had over 34,000 games on it by 2019, but this might change in the nearby future.

Epic Games Store launched on December 2018, the service launched offering better deals for developers and players. Valve on the other hand, didn’t changed the way they do business with developers, they take some pretty large cuts from sales on their platform. Valve takes around 30 percent of all revenue generated by the sales of the games, leaving around 70 percent for their creators.

Epic Games Store has probed to be a serious competition for Steam, last year they acquired timed exclusive titles, and are releasing free games every month, something that has never happened at Steam.

Refunds are also available on Epic Games Store, players can ask for a refund between the first 14 days of purchase only if they game is under 2 hours of playtime.

Do you think Epic Games Store have what it takes to dethrone Steam? leave your opinion in the comment section below.

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