Steam has launched its 2020 12 months in Evaluate, which reveals that the hours performed on Steam was 50.7% larger than 2019.Steam started its 2020 12 months in Evaluate by acknowledging the COVID-19 pandemic that’s nonetheless ongoing, and famous that whereas Steam was seeing “important progress” earlier than the lockdowns started, online game playtime surged when individuals started staying at house.This transformation led to new file breaking stats for Steam, together with 120 million month-to-month lively gamers, 62.6 million each day lively gamers, 24.8 million peak concurrent gamers, 2.6 million new purchasers monthly, 21.4% extra video games bought in comparison with 2019, and the beforehand talked about 50.7% extra hours performed in comparison with 2019 statistic.

The rise in individuals buying and enjoying video games led to an enormous enhance of visitors, with March 2020 seeing a 30-40% enhance in whole visitors associated to recreation downloads. Cyberpunk 2077 additionally added to that server stress, with the sport breaking data for obtain visitors with a peak of 52 terabytes per second, which doubled the earlier file. This, and a lot extra, led to 25.2 exabytes of information being downloaded from Steam in 2020. For reference, an exabyte is 1 million terabytes.

Have you ever performed Cyberpunk 2077?

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Whereas Steam had introduced earlier this yr that it made modifications to recreation replace downloads to handle bandwidth in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has now revealed right here that “numerous nations’ authorities our bodies approached us and different giant Web firms to see how we may assist mitigate the rise in world visitors that ISPs had been seeing, as a result of it was getting to a degree the place it was affecting individuals’s skill to do business from home and their youngsters’s distant education.”

Steam additionally revealed that it noticed 104 million SteamVR periods, 1.7 million first time SteamVR customers, 71% extra VR income, and a 30% enhance in VR playtime. VR recreation gross sales rose 32% year-over-year, and that is not even counting Half-Life: Alyx, which added one other 39% on prime of that quantity.

Controller utilization on steam additionally noticed a rise, with 46.6 million gamers utilizing a controller, 1.68 billion recreation periods with gamers utilizing a controller occuring, and 452 million recreation periods with Steam Enter occurring.

Gross sales had been additionally a giant a part of Steam’s 2020, and this helped result in a 36% enhance within the variety of video games that grossed over $100,000 from the 2019 Winter Sale to the 2020 Winter Sale.

In closing, Steam shared some initiatives it has deliberate for 2021, together with Steam China, person expertise enhancements, steam login enhancements, a potential revamp to the Steam Factors program, enhancements to Linux and Steam Labs, and far more.

For extra on Steam’s 2020, take a look at its checklist of the top-selling and most-played video games of 2020.
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Adam Bankhurst is a information author for IGN. You may comply with him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.