if your responding to me , the numbers there are people online. Which means you need to have a steam loaded and online . The second number the 8m is people actively playing a game while connected to the internet
The future of consoles
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My account is always online. My Steam clients (on multiple computers) are always running in the background. I'm not sure this is a useful metric.
I was responding to PJBLiverpool and DSoup.
Good point, I also agree with the other things you said.
WRT active accounts on steam
https://variety.com/2019/gaming/news/steam-one-billion-accounts-1203201159/
cheapchips
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Steam is truly extremely popular, holy crap, didnt even realize that. Their so huge now, even MS probably couldnt afford them
They're private. Gabe owns half of Valve, so unless he becomes bored, hard to see why they'd sell at this point.
With valve I bet it will take Gabes passing for something to really change with them. I hope Gabe doesn't go anywhere for a long time
If we time box it to a single month then we see Steam recently had 120m individual accounts logged in across the span of 1 month (more than PSN or Xbox Live over the same period). So clearly there are at least that many active Steam users, and we can then use that number in combination with the steam hardware survey to get a pretty good idea of how much gaming hardware of a certain capability there is present in machines that also have the steam client running. I.e. not dedicated mining farms or workstations. There's only one reason to have Steam installed and running, and thats to play games. However infrequently those machines may be used for playing games, they are still valid gaming platforms.
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2021-01-14-steam-has-over-120m-monthly-active-users
I don't see why not. You've already told us you do game on PC (however irregular that is compared to your console gaming) so that means you are a valid statistic to count in those user figures - because you are a steam customer. Also these are concurrent users, not concurrent instances of the client running. I strongly doubt they are counting the same account logged into multiple clients as separate users.
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I mean the metric itself. It doesn't tell you anything other than I'm a Steam user and my client is logged in. I'm not active an user but I have an active client. If I was engaging with the client, browsing my library, using the community functions or the store I'd get it.
I don't know what the consoles do. I know Microsoft report GamePass and [previously] live subscribers, and Sony report PS+ subscriptions. If either are reporting active users where I'm not using the console, that's also unhelpful. Anything else is overselling the actual activity of users.
GamePass and PS+ subscriptions are certainly a lot more useful since what matters as a business is how many they bought it. These too subscriptions most likely mean active paid. You can be in these only if you paid to use it. I doubt they count those whose subscription expired. Steam on the other hand barely means much. You subscribe for free. Its like subscribing to XBOX Live or PSN.
I still dont think it means much. My PC logs in automatically although I almost never game on my PC. My PC is predominantly used for my projects.
It is also worth pointing out that a lot of people get pirated games which are then added on their steam library for easy access. They are logged in but have pirated games on it.
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Comparatively PSN active users and XBOX Live active users are reported at around 100 million each:
https://www.sie.com/en/corporate/release/2020/200107.html
https://hothardware.com/news/xbox-live-surpasses-100-million-active-monthly-users-gamepass
XBOX Live most likely also include PC users.
Playstation Plus active users are 47 million:
https://www.psu.com/news/ps-plus-subscribers-rise-to-47-2-million-globally/#:~:text=Sony Interactive Entertainment has revealed,earnings earlier in the year.
I cant find active users for XBOX Live Gold btw
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wait a sec, pirated games can work with steam just fine? no license issue? no ban?
and, there are also people like me that use steam to launch everything. Epic store games, windows store games, old games with no launcher/store.
Steam's controller support is simply amazing. Its the only dualsense xbox controller emulator/thingy that works 100% alongside dualsense's HD Vibrator IME
Yes. I have some pirated games on its launcher that I downloaded to test my PC performance, some games I wanted to check out of curiosity. There was also a game I made some models for, that the devs gave me a code for free purchase and wanted to see my work.
And thats it. I dont game on my PC in general. But my PC logs in. The only problem you will get with pirated games is that you cant really play online (downloaded Tekken to test and play with some co workers locally and there is no online functionality). But I am sure there could be a work around for that too.
This follows exactly my talk with zed. Is that a metric? Yes. Is it real? Yes. Does it really tell us anything about the size of the PC market? Not really. That 120 million users could be playing anything from 1 minute to 1000 hours a month, and spending anything from $500 a year on games to $5.
I think rather than just trying to compare sizes, people should be picking something else more defined to measure to answer a specific question. What exactly is the intention to show? Consoles are dying? PC is thriving? Everything's going to turn mobile anyway? Pick the question, then find the metrics that prove or disprove the hypothesis.
Non-steam games, includiing pirated ones do not log playtime onto the steam client/steam servers, you can add those as a non-steam game to use Steam's overlay for the IG menu, taking screenshots, chatt etc.
So no, one cant just base everything of Steam stats only. Steam is just one of the (popular) stores on PC. It alone accounts for over 120m active users each month, over 1 billion registered users. Thats just for Steam, not enough to gauge the PC gaming market as there are more popular stores and people who dont use these stores to game on pc.
Though as Shifty pointed out above my post, all these data aint enough to gauge if the PC is dying or not, same for the consoles. It seems both markets are growing. With the PC as a singular patform being a very big one.
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To be honest, as a console user i'd be more worried (if you want to worry that is) about mobile and things like stadia/streaming then the PC being a danger, since console and pc have co-existed since forever.
Mobile won't kill console+PC simply because the market for proper games is large enough to be self sustaining. People wanting a Halo/FIFA/Uncharted experience won't ever be satisfied by mobile gaming. The only thing that can kill consoles is an exact replacement, such as streaming boxes or PCs displacing them.
This was in relation to techuse's comment below and some associated comments from DSoup (I think) about many GPU's being sold into mining farms and professional workstations with no intention of ever being used for gaming. The presence of an active Steam client on the machines suggests those machines are being used for gaming (however infrequently). i.e. those GPU's were not purchased for exclusively non-gaming purposes. So what we can say is that all of the GPU's in those systems are used for gaming, or at least have been used for gaming at some point. Which is a number we can compare to console sales because there is no guarantee that a sold console is used regularly, or even used at all.
I agree it tells us nothing of the amount of gaming hours spent, or the likelihood of that market buying the next big AAA release. But to answer the question of "how many gaming GPU's are on the market vs consoles sold". It's a valid and useful data point. And it can be used in conjunction with the Steam Hardware Survey to give us an idea of the spec of those PC's as well. Obviously taking one months worth of active Steam accounts as a measure against all consoles sold is probably significantly underselling the PC position, but even as a lower bound it's a useful metric.
To put some context against that, a quick look at the SHS shows that over 22% of all GPU's are of RTX class (not counting the RDNA2 GPU's which don't get their own breakdown). So with the detail above we can make a reasonable assumption that there are at least 22% of 120m, i.e. 26.4m individual RTX powered PC's logging into Steam in a single month. Are they all all being actively used for games? Who knows? But we know their owners have or at least have had some intention of gaming on them at some point, and when you compare those numbers to say PS5 sales which are probably in the 16m region by now, if comes across as an interesting data point to me.
The initial comparison that I posted (from Eurogamer) was comparing the active Steam users to the active XBOX Live and PSN users.
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Agreed. Xbox GamePass, Live and PS+ are all signs that people are meaningfully engaging to be in the ecosystem. You are either paying, which is good, or you are generating enough 'internet points' to get a subscription without actually spending cash but instead you're spending time and effort to get enough 'internet points' to 'pay' the subscription. I've never not paid tangible money for GamePass but I know some do.
Active engagement has a value.
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