Steam Hits One Billion Accounts

For as much as Epic Games and their new digital storefront have been in the news, depicted as kicking Steam’s ass up and down the block, it’s easy to forget just how enormous Steam actually is and how unfazed they likely are by the loss of a few exclusives… for the time being. And for a quick reminder of how monolithic Steam remains in spite of their most recent thrashings: just last month, on April 28, Steam had its billionth account made. That’s a one, followed by nine zeros. Capital B, -illion.

Of course, that’s an impressive claim, but it gets significantly less impressive when you remember that number includes inactive accounts, bots, and banned users.

A more useful metric is the concurrent user numbers, which, unfortunately, haven’t been updated in the past five months. But since 2018, it’s been noted that their concurrent user numbers peaked at over 18 million, with 90 million monthly active users. In the five months that have since passed that number has probably gone down, but probably not as much as we might think. Which, in turn, might explain why Steam has been so slow to react to the Epic Game Store.

As speculated by Techraptor, the reason for this recent explosion of Steam is probably thanks to the growing Asian market and their developing interest in PC gaming. The number of Asian-based IP addresses and games on the marketplace have been staggering, and it’s one of those markets that the Epic Game store isn’t quite equipped to address yet. If Steam is thinking that the giant Chinese and Korean markets will supplement the lost income from the Epic Game Store’s western expansion, well… they’re probably right.

This is an interesting little nugget, especially for people like me who make a habit of examining industry trends.