Looking back on 2018, Valve reviews the previous year by listing some of the projected numbers for their online storefront and gives insight for changes that came to Steam this year to cater to the platform’s continuously growing audience of players. Also some changes that will debut sometime later in 2019 were mentioned in the recent reveal.
Last year alone Steam racked up: 18.5 million concurrent players, 47 million daily players, 90 million monthly players, and 1.6 million new purchasers. To keep up with the influx of new and returning users features like the upcoming games list, protocol to filter ‘fake games’, the creation of the Steam Curator program, and developer/publisher pages were created to expand on how the store cam be navigated as exceeding expectation compared to Steam debuting nearly two decades ago.
On top of the more prevalent ways to play on Valve’s online marketplace, the latest stats on player’s preference of play choice tops with the Xbox 360 controller, following with Xbox One, and PlayStation’s Dualshock 4.
VR as well received some attention with the additions of SteamVR Input to ease stress on developer’s shoulders when having to worry about creating games and make compatible with the cast of different controllers. Along with SteamVR Motion Smoothing which gave players an increase in performance when playing games on their platform.
For what is to come this year for Steam, Valve lists some changes that will debut in the upcoming months and following for their online platform like making Steam more accessible to players in China and a specified program to run Steam better in cafes:
- Updated Steam Library
- A Unique Events System
- Expanding On SteamTV
- New Steam Chat Mobile App
- Player-Game Algorithm To Find The Right Game
Source: Valve
