On January 2, 2021, the Steam platform reaches another major milestone, breaking 25 million simultaneous users for the first time ever.
According to SteamDBthe platform reached a peak of about 25.4 million users, of which 7.4 million were in the game at the time. The graph shows the steady growth that Steam has enjoyed over the years.
As a reminder, the Steam Winter Sale is still underway and ends on January 5th. Valve also hosted a new Steam Labs experiment called ‘Exploratory Sales’ for this event, which should provide a better browsing experience.
New ways to browse during the holidays
Every holiday sale, Steam contains thousands of titles at a discount. As part of this year’s fall sale, we’ve launched more than a dozen genre and theme – specific sales pages to help players search for our most popular games at a discount during the event. We found that these theme pages led to more visits to game stores during sales than almost any other Steam store: the roster of popular games at the top of the homepage.
Because of the popularity of these theme pages, we introduced more of them in this year’s Winter Sale, and we’ve added some cleverness so we can list them now based on their potential relevance to you.
Genres, themes, features, and more
As soon as you arrive at one of these pages during the winter sale, like this one the Most Popular Winter Sale Co-Op Games, you will discover a number of ways to browse through the hundreds of games it contains. Tabs provide common subgenres, themes, or other labels shared by the hundreds of games that appear on each page. Sections of these pages in some cases also display titles that all have a common theme, such as a point of view, player support, or additional themes. And because there are so many great games on each of these pages, we’ve also introduced a fascinating page.
Facilitating browsing: search while exploring
Faceted browsing lets you tell Steam what you’re looking for while browsing, by quickly filtering titles along a variety of axes, such as visual style, theme, mood, player support and more. Concepts can be selected between categories to serve as fast AND search operations, while concepts can be selected within categories to serve as fast OR search operations.
