Steam now has 90 million monthly users

In a 2018 year in review post, in which Valve outlined plans for Steam in 2019, the company also provided some rare insight into how many people use Steam every day and every month. And the numbers are, unsurprisingly, big: in 2018, Steam averaged 47 million daily active users and 90 million monthly active users. It also broke the record for concurrent players early in 2018, with 18.5 million.

While Steam is clearly growing fast—it recently passed 30,000 games, and just look at the amount of data Valve has served up—it's interesting that that concurrent users are actually down since it broke that record in early 2018. This chart from SteamDB shows daily users declined through summer 2018, before rebounding to around 17.5 million at the beginning of 2019.

Meanwhile, in its 2018 year in review, Valve also showed how the makeup of Steam has changed over the past six years. The big takeaway, of course, is Asia's massive growth, mostly fueled by China. This chart is based on sales, rather than total logged in users, which is especially impressive given how (relatively) few Steam games have Chinese language support.

According to Steam's most recent hardware survey, English is still the most popular language with a 38 percent share, while Chinese is in second place with 21 percent.

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Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).