On January 2, 2021, the Steam platform reached another milestone, breaking 25 million simultaneous users for the first time.
According to SteamDB, the platform peaked at approximately 25.4 million users, 7.4 million of whom were in the game at the time. The graph shows the steady growth enjoyed by Steam over the years.
As a reminder, the Winter Steam Promotion is still in progress and will end on January 5. Valve has also launched a new Steam Labs Experiment dubbed ‘Exploring Sales’ for this occasion, which should provide a better browsing experience.
New ways to surf while on vacation
With every Christmas sale, Steam offers thousands of discounted titles. As part of this year’s Fall Promotion, we feature more than a dozen gender and theme-specific sales pages to help players navigate and discover our most popular discounted games during the event. We found that these themed pages generated more visits to the game store page during the sale than everyone, except for another Steam store discovery point – the featured game grid at the top of the home page.
Given the popularity of these themed pages, we’ve featured more of them in this year’s Winter Sale and added some smart information so that we can now list them based on their likely relevance to you.
Genres, themes, resources and more
Once you reach one of these pages during the Winter Promotion, like the one that features the most popular winter co-op games, you will discover several ways to browse the hundreds of games it presents. The guides offer subgenres, themes or other common brands shared by hundreds of games featured on each page. In some cases, sections of these pages also display titles that share a common theme, such as point of view, player support or additional themes. And as there are so many great games to display on each of these pages, we’ve also introduced faceted navigation.
Faceted navigation: searching while exploring
Faceted navigation lets you tell Steam what you’re looking for while browsing, quickly filtering titles along a variety of axes, such as visual style, theme, mood, player support and more. Concepts can be selected between categories to serve as quick AND search operations, while concepts can be selected within categories to serve as quick OR search operations.
