Valve recently posted a 2019 Year In Review summary with some interesting statistics and details from last year.
According to Valve, in 2019 users on Steam logged a total of 20,789,726,718 hours played.
The scale of that and other things on Steam are a bit mind boggling. For example, take the Steam Workshop,
The Steam Workshop continues to be a very popular feature among users: 4.3 million items were uploaded last year alone. Unfortunately, sometimes malicious groups would upload “fake items” (e.g “Click here for Free Skins!”) with the explicit purpose of hijacking accounts. To help mitigate these types of scams, the Workshop submission process was updated to require email verification. We’ve since moved to pre-approving items for games that had the highest rate of abuse. There has been a drastic reduction in item scams since then, with very little cost to users: approval times are less than 15 minutes on average, thanks to our full-time moderation team.
Valve also notes that “revenue from games made by our partners was up year over year, and 2019 finished strong with our most successful sale ever.” But that, of course, doesn’t answer the question on a lot of people’s minds–how were the year-over-year sales affected by the rollout of Epic’s Store?