Steam runs a number of big seasonal sales each year, but it has revealed that the most recent–the Autumn Sale that coincided with the Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend–was its biggest yet. The sale drew in new users to Steam, as well as a huge number of returning players.
While the sale exceeded previous events according to a number of benchmarks Steam tracks, the one it chose to highlight was a record amount of revenue going back to developers and publishers. The blog post says that, while it’s difficult to quantify how many games are finding success on Steam, the data shows that there are more games than ever grossing at least $10,000, all the way up to $1,000,000.
Valve also reveals that just under a million players spent money on Steam for the first time during the Autumn Sale–which isn’t too surprising in a year that has seen rapid increases in the number of people gaming on all devices, due to the pandemic keeping them inside. The peak number of concurrent players logging on for the sale also increased by around 7 million when compared to last year’s Autumn Sale.
Steam attributes some of the sale’s success to factors beyond its control, listing “the ongoing quarantine, new games finding success, older games finding fresh momentum,” among its reasons–the latter clearly a call out to this year’s surprise revival of 2018 game Among Us. While Cyberpunk 2077‘s release has been controversial due to a plethora of bugs and invitations to refund the game, it’s likely the newest CDPR game has still driven a lot of success for Steam.
Steam’s next big event is its Winter Sale, which is expected to begin on December 22 to coincide with the final round of voting in the Steam Awards.
