Steam Usage and Catalog Stats for 2023

Steam is a massive video game distribution platform.

Launched in 2003, the service has gained popularity among gamers across the world.

Today, it has more than 120 million monthly active users and a catalog of over 50 thousand games.

Read on to find the latest Steam stats for 2023. Here’s a quick overview of what you’ll find on this page:

• Top Picks
• Steam monthly active users
• Steam daily active users
• Steam peak concurrent users
• Total hours played on Steam
• How many new games are added to Steam each year?
• Steam US library
• What are the most played games on Steam?
• Steam games by genre
• SteamVR
• Steam users with VR headsets
• Steam users by OS
• Video cards among Steam users
• Steam app download stats

Top Picks

• Steam has 120 million monthly active users.
• 62.6 million people use Steam on a daily basis.
• The Steam catalog in the US includes 50,361 games.
• Steam users logged 31.3 billion hours of playtime in 2020.
• PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS holds the record for the most concurrent Steam players, peaking at 3.26M.

Steam monthly active users

Steam has 120 million monthly active users (MAUs). Steam’s active user base has grown by 26.31% over the past year, adding 25 million new monthly active users in 2020.

The number of monthly active players on Steam has increased 1.79x since 2017.

Here’s a table showing Steam’s monthly active user growth since 2017:

Source: Statista.

Steam daily active users

Steam has 62.6 million daily active users. An increase from 47 million daily users in 2018. More than half (51.99%) of MAUs access Steam at least once a day.

Source: Valve.

Steam peak concurrent users

26.85 million users concurrently accessed Steam at one point in March 2021, marking an all-time peak to date.

The average daily peak for March was 25.65 million concurrent users. That’s a year-over-year increase of 29.35%.

We’ve charted the growth in Steam’s peak concurrent user count since January 2007:

Source: SteamDB.

Total hours played on Steam

Steam users logged 31.3 billion hours of playtime in 2020. Playtime has grown by 50.55% over the last year, outstripping the 26.31% growth in MAUs.

Source: Valve.

How many new games are added to Steam each year?

Developers added 10,263 games to Steam in 2020. That’s a record number of game releases for the platform. And an increase of 27.76% over the previous year.

Here’s a table showing the annual number of Steam game releases since 2004:

Source: Statista.

Steam’s US game library

Steam’s US library contains 92,196 titles across all categories. This includes add-on content like DLC, mods and soundtracks.

50,361 games are available on Steam as of March 2021.

Source: Steam.

What are the most played games on Steam?

Ranked by all-time peak concurrent users, PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS is the most played game on Steam.

Counter-Strike and Dota 2 round out the top 3.

Here’s a complete list of the top 15 most popular games on Steam:

Source: SteamDB.

Steam games by genre

The Steam library includes 32,712 indie games, more than any other genre. Action and adventure are also popular categories, each with over 17,000 titles.

We’ve charted the number of games on Steam by genre:

Source: Steam Spy.

SteamVR

SteamVR is a dedicated tool for playing Steam games using a supported VR headset.

There were 104 million PC VR sessions on Steam in 2020. The average session time was 32 minutes.

The company claims that 1.7 million users tried SteamVR for the first time last year.

The Steam catalog includes 3,870 VR-only games (7.68% of total game count) and 4,571 games that support VR.

Source: Valve.

Steam users with VR headsets

Steam survey data suggests that only 2.3% of users have VR headsets.

Among Steam users who do own VR headsets, more than half (52.28%) use a version of Facebook’s Oculus headset.

Here’s a breakdown of Steam users that own VR headsets:

Source: Steam.

Steam users by OS

The vast majority (96.17%) of Steam users access the service on Windows.

Here’s the full breakdown of Steam users by operating system:

Source: Steam.

Video cards among Steam users

75.41% of Steam users on PC have a video card made by NVIDIA. AMD and Intel account for a further 24.46%.

Here’s a comprehensive overview of PC video cards among the Steam user base:

Source: Steam.

Steam app download stats

The Steam mobile app was downloaded 1.5 million times across iOS and Android in March 2021 alone. Google Play accounted for 53.33% (800 thousand) of total downloads, and the remaining 46.67% (700 thousand) came from the App Store.

All-time Android downloads of the Steam app exceed 50 million.

Steam also has an affiliated chat app, Steam Chat. The app was installed 60 thousand times in March 2021. More than 1 million total users have downloaded Steam Chat on Android.

Sources: Sensor Tower, Google Play.

Conclusion

That’s all for my 2023 Steam stats roundup.

The video game platform has consistently grown its user base since launching almost two decades ago.

As with other gaming-related services, Steam saw an increase in usage during the pandemic. Do you think the platform can maintain this momentum? Or will it suffer as the world reopens?

If you have any questions about the stats included here, I’d be more than happy to provide clarification. I’d also love to hear any general feedback: it helps me make these roundups even better.

So please get in touch in the comments below.