30 Million Gamers Were Logged Into Steam Today (kotaku.com) 51
Steam launched in 2003 — and as recently as 2015, its record for concurrent users logged into the service was 10 million people, reports Kotaku (growing to 14 million in 2017, and by March of 2020, rising up to 20 million).
But now it's jumped another 50% — just two and a half years: We got to 28 million users earlier this year — more than the entire populations of countries like Australia and Taiwan — and now, in late October, we've hit the nice round number of 30 million, with the peak number of users logged on earlier today standing at 30,032,005.
Note that this isn't the number of people playing at any one time, just the number of people logged into the platform, a feat that's often achieved simply by turning your PC on. If you want to know the number of users actually in a game at that time, SteamDB figures put the peak at around 8.5 million, which is still an enormous figure, and a big jump (proportionally) even from earlier in 2022, when the highest number of active players stood at "between seven and eight million".
But now it's jumped another 50% — just two and a half years: We got to 28 million users earlier this year — more than the entire populations of countries like Australia and Taiwan — and now, in late October, we've hit the nice round number of 30 million, with the peak number of users logged on earlier today standing at 30,032,005.
Note that this isn't the number of people playing at any one time, just the number of people logged into the platform, a feat that's often achieved simply by turning your PC on. If you want to know the number of users actually in a game at that time, SteamDB figures put the peak at around 8.5 million, which is still an enormous figure, and a big jump (proportionally) even from earlier in 2022, when the highest number of active players stood at "between seven and eight million".
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India? Eeeeew. Gross.
meaningless stat (Score:5, Funny)
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Yup, it doesn't log you out when you stop playing or turn off the computer.
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Yup, it doesn't log you out when you stop playing or turn off the computer.
Yeah, but don't tell shareholders about that little "feature" update. And for fucks sake whisper if you're around Wall Street. Someone might get wind that this house of cards is subject to drastic change based on delusional statistics that actually don't mean a damn thing financially.
Kind of like justifying current stock prices.
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I can't imagine he could care less what the shareholders who wouldn't sell to him think.
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Valve is an LLC majority owned by Gabe Newell. I can't imagine he could care less what the shareholders who wouldn't sell to him think.
I can't imagine such a technical "feature" existing for any other reason than to pad the kinds of statistics shareholders and potential investors drool over. Otherwise, why not disable it?
If the aforementioned comment is accurate, leaving the account logged in when not playing or even when that computer is powered off, seems rather senseless, particularly if it warps the shit out of the very statistics they're bragging about.
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But I know Gabe Newell doesn't need to answer to any shareholders, nor does he have to worry about investors.
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Steam is shit. Not so much the service, except ofc that it's fundamentally based around DRM, but the client is total garbage. As such, if you want to just start playing a game, you want Steam to have logged itself in already. It takes way longer to launch Steam than it does to launch a web browser and load a page, despite the fact that Steam doesn't do anything you couldn't accomplish with Chrome add-ons (which, unlike Firefox add-ons, are able to write to the filesystem.)
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The "feature" has a very real use. Like every other communication and/or update tool, it leaves you logged in because they want you to be chatting with your friends on the platform, which of course, requires that you be logged in in order to do that. It also allows updates of games since of course you are free to run steam in offline mode if you wish but then you cant get updates for games while doing that. It will log you out if you turn off your computer, but not if you are also logged in via a mobile dev
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I only have two friends on Steam, one is a complete and utter stranger who mysteriously sent a friend request, and the other is someone I talk to in person. And I disable auto-update of games. If I'm not going to be playing a game for some time then I don't need it to suck up bandwidth just in case. Also, I have several games that break after an update (so I play them w/o steam to avoid that).
I think quite a lot, maybe a majority, of Steam users only want it to load games. They don't want to be like xbo
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ok great, then log out of the friends portion and/or go into offline mode. Problem solved, the options already exist for what you want
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Lots of software does this now. Microsoft wants all their apps to preload for a better user experience, sucking up your memory just so that you can have an instant start. Sometimes they break and I have to go and disable their auto-start if they suck up CPU too (the behind the scenes updaters do this a lot). Steam actually seems a bit minor here in that it doesn't auto-start after a reboot and so far has never been the culprit when I track down what is sucking up resources.
Re:meaningless stat (Score:4, Insightful)
2 people are online on my friend list today.
1 of them I know never turns their computer off, the other I suspect is also the case.
The rest are all offline.
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I didn't mean you were "online" while the computer is off. But that you're instantly back on as soon as you turn on your computer again. If you close Steam it's still running. If you then hibernate turn of the computer, then Steam is back running instantly when you power the computer back on (I normally hibernate). The only time I need to enter the Steam password is when Windows does an update. Maybe the back office might think I'm idle, and maybe they can figure out I'm really offline, but the applicat
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I didn't mean you were "online" while the computer is off. But that you're instantly back on as soon as you turn on your computer again.
OK, it wasn't clear if you were trying to imply that they're counting people with their computers off as being "online".
I have seen zero evidence this is the case, and lots of evidence that it isn't the case.
If that isn't what you were trying to imply, then nevermind.
The observation that "Steam is running when my computer is", is certainly its default installation configuration, and thus likely to be true in almost all cases.
Re: meaningless stat (Score:2)
Re:meaningless stat (Score:4, Informative)
There it also says ~8.5 million peak active players, which are a bit more accurate.
I say a bit more accurate, because according to Steam I've got nearly 15k hours in Blender, which however is mainly because I just keep instances of it running in the background while I do nothing with it.
I find Steam's hardware survey useful though..
I use the data from there as some more founded evidence to see that AMD GPUs for gaming are still the underdog by a wide margin, while reddit AMD circle-jerks would have you believe that 95% of people use AMD GPUs for gaming these days. And I'm sure on NVIDIA subreddits nearly 100% of people do use NVIDIA. Thus when I, a single person developer with limited resources, do something that needs to run on the GPU, I can take a look in Steam's stats there and see that my main focus should remain on NVIDIA.
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I've been considering switching to AMD video but I went ahead and upgraded to a new used nvidia card instead and boy, am I happy that I did, because most of this fancy new graphics machine learning shit is written for cuda.
OTOH I've been using AMD processors almost exclusively since the introduction of the Athlon, and every time I bought intel I regretted it. Whereas the only AMD chip I regretted owning was an original K6...
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Currently I'm using the same Ryzen 9 3900X that I bought in 2019 and am still reasonably happy with it. Some applications here and there (like Substance Painter) give me warnings about Ryzen causing crashes and data corruption, but I've experienced non of that. Perhaps it was an issue with Zen1/Zen1+, because those are the systems I find when I look up issues. But for all I know, AMD had tak
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I could see running a production app in the background but the last time I had to run a game in the background was Everquest. In EQ you could just point your character at a wall and swim forever and get your skill up in swimming. Also merchant mode meant leaving your character signed in and standing in a specific area while holding a bag with items to sell. Or you were literally holding a camp and waiting for a spawn.
So glad I had time as a teenager to play that game. I'm only amazed it didn't ruin more adu
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I just checked my system. I use Steam occasionally, pretty much always by surprise: I click on a desktop game icon and Steam runs to run the program. No problem, okay by me. But Steam is NOT running all the time, just because my PC is running. So I don't know where he got that from.
And I don't know why you want to be logged on to those accounts all the time if you aren't doing anything there.
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A whopping 0.00375% of the global population!
You're off by two orders of magnitude: 30 million divided by 7 billion is 0.38% not 0.0038%. Another way to put it is that 1 in 300 people are logged into stream at the moment.
... and nothing of value was done or created (Score:2, Interesting)
Once while on acid I was floating above the Earth and looking down in wonder at all the wasted time that was leaking from the atmosphere like a surging sea of gas.
Now I know why.
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We all know you thrive on the idea of work, work only work stopping for meals and sleep until you die. Actual humans have for all of history required other outlets. Hobbies, entertainment, stories, enjoyment of creative arts, they are required to keep us sane.
Instead of thinking of playing games as "nothing of value", consider just how fucked up the world would be if everything we always had to do required generating some form of "value". Then you will see the inherent value of it.
Also get of Slashdot, you'
Re: ... and nothing of value was done or created (Score:1)
Also get of [sic] Slashdot, you're not providing any value
It's off. Get off Slashdot. I triggered you and you triggered a grammar nazi.
But only YOU learnt anything. How is there no value in that?
Granted, you used the correct you're but with no there, their or they're in evidence, I can only attribute that to pure luck.
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No, they didn't trigger a grammar nazi, they triggered some one too stupid to tell a typo from a grammatical error.
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That was just you tripping. Don't put your wasted time on others.
Steam makes Slashdot front-page news (Score:2)
Half Life 3 confirmed!
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GabeN can't count to 3.
Steam is popular because ??? (Score:2)
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I've gotten numerous games from Steam because it's a super simple place to see if a game natively runs on Linux and a few clicks and you are playing the game. Also, you can sometimes kill Steam after you start the game and in single player games you can actually use steam offline.
Mount and Blade: Warband I use to play a ton offline mode entirely. Wurm Unlimited is online only but that's just to connect you to the individually hosted game servers. Once you connect you can kill steam and literally connect aga
Re:Steam is popular because ??? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah because Epic, Origin, Uplay/Ubisoft Connect, etc. are so much better.
Let's face it, unless you're buying from GoG you run into the same problems everywhere. At least Valve doesn't pressure outside publishers to make titles exclusive to their store (unlike Epic).
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Yeah because Epic, Origin, Uplay/Ubisoft Connect, etc. are so much better.
Let's face it, unless you're buying from GoG you run into the same problems everywhere. At least Valve doesn't pressure outside publishers to make titles exclusive to their store (unlike Epic).
This.
Steam back in the bad old days was terrible. It was slow, a resource hog and best avoided... Which unless the game was Valve's own, you could even if it was installed via Steam. For a lot of Steam games you can still go via the executable and save time. Steam slowly got better but the real reason Steam is popular is that it realised you had to put the gamers first. Steam is a means to an end, not a way to funnel eyeballs and profits. Even though Steam is required for a lot of games these days, they
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There may be some games that require active internet connection but I wonder if that's a game requirement and not a steam one.
Steam.... (Score:2)
....Lets me play almost all my games on Linux, that'll do ...
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My kids begged me to get them Windows laptops so they could play games. They had been using Steam under Linux, but there were a few games they wanted that weren't available on Steam. So I got them both Windows laptops.
About a year later, one of my kids begged me to buy him an upgraded GPU for his Linux desktop, as he was absolutely hating the Windows experience, and vastly prefers Kubuntu over Windows. He's also been reading the tea-leaves of where Microsoft is taking Windows, and has decided he wants no pa
game streamer (Score:1)