Valve’s Steam Year in Review shows PC gaming is on the rise – and so is VR

Valve is doing its part to illustrate the growth of the game last year with its Steam 2020 Year in Review report. It contains quite impressive numbers, such as the fact that computer players increased their playing time by more than 50 percent last year every month, 2.6 million people bought a game on Steam for the first time.

2020 has been a rough year, and many of us use games as a way to escape the horrors of all that is going on – a goal aided by the fact that so many great games were released last year. More than half of Americans played video games in 2020, and although Steam’s numbers only represent the computer (and do not count games like that) Fortnite (which appears in competing computer stores), still speaks to the fact that PC games not only survive but also thrive.

Image: valve

In addition to the extra time played and the newcomers to the platform, Steam data also shows that the number of games sold has grown by 21.4 percent, and that the platform has been played by as many as 24.8 million people simultaneously, who set a new record for simultaneous record. players for the second time that year.

2020 was also the year of Valve Half-life: Alyx came out, which we hoped would eventually be a killer app for VR, a game that would eventually entice people to give VR a chance. Do Steam’s numbers confirm this? Well, VR has certainly grown, with 1.7 million people using Steam’s VR interface for the first time, possibly due to new headsets that have emerged, such as the Oculus Quest 2. Valve also reports that there is a there was a 71 percent increase in VR sales, with Alyx alone it makes up 39 percent of it. People also played more in VR, with playing time up 30 percent.

Image: valve

Of PC games played outside of the traditional “mouse and keyboard paired with a Windows machine” model, Valve also sees a 66.6 percent increase in game sessions played with a controller. Steam also takes note of its work to bring games to Linux with its Proton runtime and calls out Death Stranding and Cyberpunk 2077 as games that were available on the operating system shortly after it was released on Windows.