In a 2018 year in review post, in which Valve outlined plans for Steam in 2019 (opens in new tab), 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 (opens in new tab).
While Steam is clearly growing fast—it recently passed 30,000 games (opens in new tab), and just look at the amount of data Valve (opens in new tab) 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 (opens in new tab), 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.
