Valve’s Steam Year in Review shows PC games on the rise – and VR too

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

2020 was a difficult year, and many of us used games as a way to escape the horribility of everything that is happening in the world – a goal helped by the fact that so many good games were released last year. More than half of Americans played video games in 2020, and while Steam numbers represent only the PC (and don’t count games like Fifteen days that appear in rival PC stores), still talks about the fact that PC games are not only surviving, but thriving.

Image: Valve

In addition to the extra time spent playing and newcomers to the platform, Steam data also shows that the number of games sold grew by 21.4 percent, and the platform had up to 24.8 million people playing at the same time, establishing a new record for simultaneous games players for the second time that year.

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

Image: Valve

Speaking of PC games being played outside the traditional “mouse and keyboard connected to a Windows machine” model, Valve also sees a 66.6% increase in game sessions that were played with a controller. Steam also notes its work on bringing games to Linux with its Proton runtime and calls Death Stranding and Cyberpunk 2077 like games that were available on the operating system right after they were released on Windows.