Steam's 2020 Autumn Sale was its biggest yet

Valve's latest Steamworks Development blog provides a look at some of the numbers from this year's Autumn Sale. Normally a footnote compared to the Winter Sale, the Autumn Sale actually featured some pretty decent discounts this year and was apparently "the biggest-ever in terms of revenue for developers and publishers". Ongoing COVID-19 quarantines in many countries probably helped the sale, which overlapped with a Black Friday and Cyber Monday that saw online shopping up 22 percent according to Adobe Analytics.

Steam's concurrent user numbers reached almost 24 million, which is "about 7 million more simultaneous users" than the same time last year. Valve also said that, "just shy of a million players bought a game or made a microtransaction on Steam for the very first time", which is apparently an increase of a third on the same period in 2019. Steam's new pages dedicated to categories sorted by genre seem to be working, as Valve reports "the genre hub pages drove as many add-to-carts as our front-page highlighted daily deals" during the sale.

The final nominees for 2020's Steam Awards are being revealed one category per day, and voting will run from December 22 at 10AM PST through to January 3 at 9AM PST. Whoever nominated Untitled Goose Game for the Sit Back and Relax Award had a very different experience of that raucous honking party than my household did.

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Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.