We Spent 20 Billion Hours Playing Games on Steam Last Year

I knew ya’ll liked video games but maybe we’re taking it a bit too far.

At the end of each year, Valve, like a lot of companies, posted a “Year in Review” retrospective of the previous year, 2019. It’s a pretty comprehensive look at everything that happened in the previous year, but since we’re pressed for time and character count, allow me to summarize the most interesting tidbits below while linking you to the main blog post here.

Steam Labs, an improved way to get customer feedback and show people games they may be interested in, lead to 6.1 million more wishlist additions.
DLC continued to be possible thanks to discovery improvements, and over 121 million DLC pages were visited over the year.
The Steam Mobile Chat app was installed over a million times, and an average of a million push notifications are sent every day. Chat stickers were also added, and 6.6 million were sent during the Winter Sale.
4.3 million items were uploaded into the Steam Workshop.
66% of users engaged with those community-building events that were released alongside sales and events throughout the year.
There was a 300% increase of reviews posted – they’re up to 70 thousand every day.
3.7 million people took advantage of Remote Play.
6,500 games can be played on the Linux.
Everyone, around the world, spent 20 billion hours playing games in 2019.

That’s just the highlights, but the blog post also talks about changes they have planned for 2020 (which includes a PC Café Program and the ability to buy and listen to soundtracks) as well as some stuff that you might have missed through the year, which was frankly quite boring so I didn’t include it. Did you know Steam had a newsletter?

Anyway. 20 billion hours playing games. That’s an eye-opener, eh?