Steam now has more than one billion accounts registered worldwide, according to website Steam ID Finder. The PC platform giant was first introduced in 2003, 16 years ago. The one billionth user, “amusedsilentdragonfly”, officially joined the Steam service on April 28. It should be a momentous occasion, one that cements Steam as the true face of PC gaming, but alas, Valve has kept quiet on it. This is probably considering the fact that there are millions of spam and throwaway accounts registered on the platform, which makes the achievement basically moot. Still, if that account was owned by a real person, it must be nice seeing your steamID3 set to [U:1:1000000000].
What Valve should be proud of, however, is its current statistics involving active users. Reported last
January, the company has stated that Steam has about 90 million active users, which is roughly the same number of users as Sony’s PlayStation Now service. As of the time of this writing, the concurrent Steam users sit at around 16 million players, which is absurd. This is no laughing matter even now, considering that Steam has – though somewhat inadvertently and through no fault of their own – entered a digital distribution PC platform war with Epic Games.
Looking closer at the original report from TechRaptor will point out just what Steam’s current advantage to Epic is, and it’s not remotely related to user count. A segment focused on emerging markets hosted by Valve during the GDC goes to show that the bulk of transactions in Asia were made under non-standard methods, making up 87.5 percent. The five ‘standard’ transactions (PayPal, Credit Cards, etc.) only made up 12.5 percent of the total.
What does this mean, exactly? Well, you can’t really access a lot of alternative payment methods on the Epic Games Store, and if they do exist, it carries such a large premium that it might turn you off from buying altogether. Of course, in the long run, we’ll still have to see if Steam’s growth changes, especially now that Epic has started on its plans to buy out studios such as Rocket League developer Psyonix.
