4 ms·

It's an odd metric: all it really tells us is how many people "have a game fired up", a context in which 10 million people is basically nothing compared to how

It's an odd metric: all it really tells us is how many people "have a game fired up", a context in which 10 million people is basically nothing compared to how many people were actually playing games over the weekend, as well as how many people's computers with steam installed are currently on and connected to the internet, again a context in which 32 million is basically nothing. Do these numbers actually give some kind of insights, or are they just the metrics equivalent of trivia?

flohofwoe 4y ago
Apparently it's the highest number in Steam history, meaning active user numbers have been growing, not shrinking. That at least should put the decades old meme to rest that "PC gaming is dead" ;)
- xwdv 4y ago
  It helps that this generation of consoles was so shitty and suffering from supply chain issues as well. Turned many people to PC gaming.
  - dns_snek 4y ago
    Getting your hands on a graphics cards hasn't been easy in the past ~2 years either but I suppose it was still easier to get a hold of some PC (a laptop perhaps) that can run less demanding games than say, a PS5.
    - Aperocky 4y ago
      The supply chain issues seems to be resolving, just before the holiday season I got myself a RTX 3060 from bestbuy at MSRP.
    - zamalek 4y ago
      OEM prebuilts (Dell, Alienware, HP, etc.), while a waste of good GPUs, were somewhat available during that period. Some self-builders were turning to buy those, just to get the GPU out of them. New PC gamers would have been able to at least back-order a prebuilt PC, versus playing the indefinite refresh lottery for a console.
    - mrtranscendence 4y ago
      PS5s were always available, just at a scalping premium that could be several hundred dollars. $800 for a PS5 is probably (arguably?) a better deal than an $800 laptop, which would have trouble playing relatively modern titles well. At least if your only goal was playing games.
      - KptMarchewa 4y ago
        Why would you compare stationary console to mobile laptop? At least compare to a desktop. Otherwise, I agree that consoles have best bang for buck now.
        mrtranscendence 4y ago
        The question was whether a desperate gamer on a budget could get their hands on something to play games with. I'm assuming that mobility isn't a concern, and so isn't relevant to the comparison. Obviously a laptop has benefits that a PS5 doesn't offer, but then so does a desktop computer.
        KptMarchewa 4y ago
        Yes, but mobility brings additional constraints on performance that desktop computer does not provide - simply because of focus on battery life and power performance. Consoles are optimized for the job they are doing, so pick a PC that is optimized too.
        xwdv 4y ago
        Best bang for the buck? In terms of raw hardware, maybe. But the buck bangs less when you consider the inferior library of games.
        KptMarchewa 4y ago
        To each their own. I did not own PS4, so I have its whole library to play through. Besides those, I only need Factorio and that runs on my work macbook.
  - KptMarchewa 4y ago
    Shitty? I would say those are relatively best consoles ever - cool, silent, and finally have fast SSDs. PS4 was a jet engine, and was extremely underpowered - it's graphics were already obsolete at launch. "Pro" version launched already three years after original one. The supply chain stuff is real though and really hampered the adoption and prevalence of current-gen games. If you could get hands on them, they've been best gaming "investment" you could make, compared to GPU prices.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  I would guess that PC gaming has been dying since 1982... So a good 40 year run at this point.
zamadatix 4y ago
What useful insights these stats can provide depends on what question you’re trying to answer with what other data you can publicly get, combine, and estimate from. Internally Steam keeps very detailed playtime-by-game-by-user stats but as for what’s aggregated and published publicly you just get the stats the article talks about which leads to it being the best way to monitor growth/activity. It’s been a while since Valve publicly reported MAU but I think it was something like 130 million in 2021. Steam APIs used to report achievement statistics float-accurate. This was patched once people started using it to estimate game sales based on “launch the game” type achievements. Not sure how many data holes like this have existed. The flip to your game stats being private by default also limited scraping abilities. They also give samples hardware stats of their user base publicly by month but that doesn’t really tell you much about the platform. Cool for other things though (mainly intended for developers to understand what the user base has).
karaterobot 4y ago
I agree that it's a meaningless number by itself. The interesting part for me was seeing that the number of connected users went up by 50% over pandemic, from 20M to 30M. Given that Steam was pretty mature at that point, that's a big jump. Presumably it was due to quarantine. But it's also interesting that nobody is really in quarantine right now, so breaking that record means they've just grown quite a bit despite already being very large. The games they're playing are (mostly) not new either, so this just reflects a massive growth in the platform qua platform over the last couple years.
danbruc 4y ago
It looks surprisingly low initially but I don't think it actually is. 10 million people, that is 1 in 800 of the world population. You sleep eight hours, that makes it 1 in 533 of all people awake. Then we have to divide out the part of the world population lacking the means to use Steam, Internet usage alone seems to be about 5 out of 8 according to the numbers a quick search turned up. This brings us down to 1 in 333 at most, their might however be a correlation between Internet users and being awake. Then we have console gaming vs PC gaming even though streaming and handhelds might make this a bit fuzzy. An older number I found says 1 in 3 are playing on a PC, dropping us to 1 in 111. And people of course do many other things besides playing games including not playing games at all, but it gets progressively harder for me to come up with realistic numbers and more and more correlations will make just multiplying fractions more and more wrong, so I will leave it a that.
- Arrath 4y ago
  Interesting break down of the numbers, thanks!

flohofwoe 4y ago

Apparently it's the highest number in Steam history, meaning active user numbers have been growing, not shrinking. That at least should put the decades old meme to rest that "PC gaming is dead" ;)

xwdv 4y ago
It helps that this generation of consoles was so shitty and suffering from supply chain issues as well. Turned many people to PC gaming.
- dns_snek 4y ago
  Getting your hands on a graphics cards hasn't been easy in the past ~2 years either but I suppose it was still easier to get a hold of some PC (a laptop perhaps) that can run less demanding games than say, a PS5.
  - Aperocky 4y ago
    The supply chain issues seems to be resolving, just before the holiday season I got myself a RTX 3060 from bestbuy at MSRP.
  - zamalek 4y ago
    OEM prebuilts (Dell, Alienware, HP, etc.), while a waste of good GPUs, were somewhat available during that period. Some self-builders were turning to buy those, just to get the GPU out of them. New PC gamers would have been able to at least back-order a prebuilt PC, versus playing the indefinite refresh lottery for a console.
  - mrtranscendence 4y ago
    PS5s were always available, just at a scalping premium that could be several hundred dollars. $800 for a PS5 is probably (arguably?) a better deal than an $800 laptop, which would have trouble playing relatively modern titles well. At least if your only goal was playing games.
    - KptMarchewa 4y ago
      Why would you compare stationary console to mobile laptop? At least compare to a desktop. Otherwise, I agree that consoles have best bang for buck now.
      - mrtranscendence 4y ago
        The question was whether a desperate gamer on a budget could get their hands on something to play games with. I'm assuming that mobility isn't a concern, and so isn't relevant to the comparison. Obviously a laptop has benefits that a PS5 doesn't offer, but then so does a desktop computer.
        KptMarchewa 4y ago
        Yes, but mobility brings additional constraints on performance that desktop computer does not provide - simply because of focus on battery life and power performance. Consoles are optimized for the job they are doing, so pick a PC that is optimized too.
      - xwdv 4y ago
        Best bang for the buck? In terms of raw hardware, maybe. But the buck bangs less when you consider the inferior library of games.
        KptMarchewa 4y ago
        To each their own. I did not own PS4, so I have its whole library to play through. Besides those, I only need Factorio and that runs on my work macbook.
- KptMarchewa 4y ago
  Shitty? I would say those are relatively best consoles ever - cool, silent, and finally have fast SSDs. PS4 was a jet engine, and was extremely underpowered - it's graphics were already obsolete at launch. "Pro" version launched already three years after original one. The supply chain stuff is real though and really hampered the adoption and prevalence of current-gen games. If you could get hands on them, they've been best gaming "investment" you could make, compared to GPU prices.
Ekaros 4y ago
I would guess that PC gaming has been dying since 1982... So a good 40 year run at this point.

zamadatix 4y ago

What useful insights these stats can provide depends on what question you’re trying to answer with what other data you can publicly get, combine, and estimate from. Internally Steam keeps very detailed playtime-by-game-by-user stats but as for what’s aggregated and published publicly you just get the stats the article talks about which leads to it being the best way to monitor growth/activity. It’s been a while since Valve publicly reported MAU but I think it was something like 130 million in 2021. Steam APIs used to report achievement statistics float-accurate. This was patched once people started using it to estimate game sales based on “launch the game” type achievements. Not sure how many data holes like this have existed. The flip to your game stats being private by default also limited scraping abilities. They also give samples hardware stats of their user base publicly by month but that doesn’t really tell you much about the platform. Cool for other things though (mainly intended for developers to understand what the user base has).

karaterobot 4y ago

I agree that it's a meaningless number by itself. The interesting part for me was seeing that the number of connected users went up by 50% over pandemic, from 20M to 30M. Given that Steam was pretty mature at that point, that's a big jump. Presumably it was due to quarantine. But it's also interesting that nobody is really in quarantine right now, so breaking that record means they've just grown quite a bit despite already being very large. The games they're playing are (mostly) not new either, so this just reflects a massive growth in the platform qua platform over the last couple years.

danbruc 4y ago

It looks surprisingly low initially but I don't think it actually is. 10 million people, that is 1 in 800 of the world population. You sleep eight hours, that makes it 1 in 533 of all people awake. Then we have to divide out the part of the world population lacking the means to use Steam, Internet usage alone seems to be about 5 out of 8 according to the numbers a quick search turned up. This brings us down to 1 in 333 at most, their might however be a correlation between Internet users and being awake. Then we have console gaming vs PC gaming even though streaming and handhelds might make this a bit fuzzy. An older number I found says 1 in 3 are playing on a PC, dropping us to 1 in 111. And people of course do many other things besides playing games including not playing games at all, but it gets progressively harder for me to come up with realistic numbers and more and more correlations will make just multiplying fractions more and more wrong, so I will leave it a that.

Arrath 4y ago
Interesting break down of the numbers, thanks!