Steam’s ‘yr in evaluate’ has simply been printed for 2020, full with a raft of statistics which present that the gaming platform has by no means been extra in style – together with some statements that Linux avid gamers will probably discover thrilling.
After all, it’s no nice shock to listen to that extra individuals had been enjoying video games on their PC final yr – what with Covid-19 lockdowns and people spending much more time inside at dwelling – and certainly Steam’s stats present that there was an enormous 50% enhance within the variety of hours spent gaming on the platform.
Players had been collectively on Steam for over 31 billion hours, in reality, and there was a brand new excessive when it comes to month-to-month lively customers at 120.4 million (with each day lively customers peaking at 62.6 million). A brand new document was additionally set when it comes to concurrent customers – of us enjoying concurrently at anybody given time – at 24.8 million.
Valve’s coffers naturally felt the advantage of all this, and certainly the variety of video games bought went up by simply over 21% in comparison with 2019.
VR gaming additionally gained recognition, with even stronger development of sport gross sales which had been up 32% in comparison with the earlier yr. Apparently over 1.7 million Steam customers tried VR video games for the primary time in 2020.
There was additionally a marked enhance within the variety of avid gamers utilizing a controller quite than keyboard and mouse, with some 46.6 million gamers utilizing a gamepad in 2020 – in comparison with 31.8 million customers in 2019. That’s a significant enhance of 46%.
Proton plus
Lastly, we talked about excellent news for Linux avid gamers on the outset, and Valve famous that: “All through 2020, work continued on Steam Play and lengthening Proton, our runtime for seamlessly operating present Steam video games on Linux with out extra developer work. We launched Proton 5, which supported many new video games, improved efficiency, and launched help for DX12 and EA Origin video games on Steam.”
Apparently there was additionally a rise within the variety of builders testing their video games with Proton throughout the improvement course of, and what’s extra, fixing points that popped up with Proton after launch.
Valve observes: “All in all, this resulted in thrilling new releases this yr resembling Dying Stranding, Horizon: Zero Daybreak, and Cyberpunk 2077 being playable on Linux at or shortly after launch.”
The actually attention-grabbing bit is that trying to 2021, Valve stated it could proceed to speculate on this expertise, and that it’s “placing collectively new methods for potential customers to get into Linux gaming and expertise these enhancements.”
That sounds promising certainly when it comes to opening up Linux to additional publicity as a dependable gaming platform and various to Home windows.
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