With an increasing user-base, Steam has showed that you don’t need freebies to gain the trust of users. Good service is important too.
In the world of PC gaming, Steam is considered a golden standard. It’s a gaming store created by the game developer Valve, best known for it’s Half-Life, Portal, Counter Strike and Team Fortress gaming series. Steam also is gaming client come game launcher software. Allowing users to arrange and launch all the games they have purchased from Steam. Initially created to serve updates to its games, Steam has come a long way.
Almost every PC game developer or publisher in the world lists their games to be sold on Steam. In fact, so big is Steam’s impact that it once accounted for 75% online market share in PC gaming sales.
This meant that gaming companies saw an opportunity for themselves. They thought, why pay Steam about 30% of their sale money if they can make their own store. Several gaming companies have tried doing so. They started releasing their games exclusively on their own gaming store, on their own gaming client.
Come Epic Games Store
One of them is Epic Games Store created by Epic Games, best known for its Unreal, Gears of War and Fortnite games. With huge investments from Chinese giant Tencent, Epic Games created a gaming store to break the Steam’s monopoly. Subsidized with massive cuts in fees, Epic Games Store has tried swaying game companies away from Steam. It also gives away at least two free games every week to attract players too.
But players aren’t the most innocent creatures. They look for their own best interests. Epic Game’s Store is a frustrating mess. It does not even have a quarter, forget half, of the features which Steam provides. At most, many use Epic Games Store only to get free games.
Except Epic Games, many other companies have realized, they cannot compete with Steam either in features or quality. Some have closed their gaming stores, some have started releasing games both on their on service and Steam too. Looks like there’s a good reason for it.
Steam Crosses 30 Million Peak Players
With Epic Games offering free games, one would wonder if Steam could continue with its user-base like this. Yes, Steam offers superior features, quality and less frustrating service. But can it fight against freebies offered by Epic Games. Apparently the answer is yes. Not only Steam is fighting nicely against Epic Games Store, it’s setting new records.
Not so long ago, Steam introduced an updated Steam Charts page which offered information about peak players on Steam. It shows total daily players online on Steam and also shows top-selling games weekly and in total, most played games daily or otherwise, among many other things.
Today, the Steam Charts page has revealed that it has crossed 30 million peak online users. Specifically, on about 23rd October, at about 2 PM UTC time, Steam had about 30,026,351 players online (the numbers keep changing slightly). SteamDB, a third party Steam database tracker site, confirms the same.
The numbers are fascinating. One might wonder, that’s just 0.37% of world population. But we are talking about a single PC gaming service having that many players online together just at that moment. That 0.37% world population is huge.
Outcome Of Big Peak Online Users
While it’s true that peak online users does not mean everyone is playing / launching a game from Steam or browsing the Steam store. It’s still very significant.
What’s important here that the strong fight showed by Epic Games to sway the users away from Steam by giving away free games is not working. Make no mistake, nothing wrong in offering free games. But not with anti-competitive and anti-consumer behavior, where one buys out or bribes game developers by signing exclusive store contracts by giving away huge amounts of money. That money could be better invested in improving the game store and also getting rid of questionable investors which raise the privacy concerns for the users.
As for Steam, this shows it is only growing more. Make no mistake. Steam is not perfect. Steam too has its own set of issues. Higher developer fees and it’s support center being just a couple out of many of them. But it’s certainly the best we have right now. Here’s hoping it improves even further.
