Steam shared their 2020 data, and it’s interesting.
The first thing to note is that each month there were 2.6 million new people who bought their first game on Steam. In 2018 it was just 1.6 million. That’s very good news for indie developers like my brother and me.
As soon as we released our first game, someone pirated it and made it available to download for free as a torrent. Anyone could play it without paying for it. And yet our sales are increasing because more people are joining Steam and buying games legally.
50.7% more hours played compared to 2019 — not surprising. People had to stay home due to the pandemic, they got bored, they played games. However, they not only played freely available games like Fortnite. They actually bought 21.4% more games.
I thought people would be buying games less and less. Not only are there so many free-to-play games, but you don’t even have to buy all the games that you want to play because Epic gives away a free game every week. It looks like it didn’t hurt the market after all.
You can read the whole Steam year review here.