Valve’s results show that the PC continues to grow as a platform, with Steam posting another excellent result.

Yesterday afternoon, Steam set a new record with over 40.2 million concurrent users on the platform at any one time, 12.7 million of whom were playing games. Steam has seen tremendous growth over the past year, if you can remember what the digital platform has become (something Valve certainly didn’t think about two decades ago when Half-Life 2 was in stores).

On January 7th of last year, Steam had 33.6 million users. By March 2 of last year, that number had jumped to 34.2 million. By March 15th, the platform had reached 36.3 million, topped by 37.2 million on August 26th. On September 23, Steam reached 38.3 million, and on December 8, the platform had 39.2 million concurrent online users. An increase of almost 20% in one year? That’s something!

Recently, Epic Games also released some data: Tim Sweeney and his team reported that the platform has over 295 million accounts (an increase of 25 million in one year) and 67 million monthly users who have played a total of 7.72 billion hours through the Epic Games Launcher.

This is further proof that the PC is doing well, and it’s no coincidence that we’re seeing multiplatform strategies from several companies (Sony and Square Enix are also trying). It’s no use: if a game is released on PC, it can appeal to a larger audience and the company/publisher can make more profit from it. Microsoft realized this a few years ago when they abandoned Xbox One exclusivity (although there are still some games that are only available on the console – like Halo 5: Guardians, but we wrote about why it didn’t get a PC conversion).

Keep it up, Gaben…

Source: WCCFTech