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The story
On October 11, it was reported that the concurrent user count on Valve’s PC gaming platform “Steam” hit an all-time high of approximately 43.5 million. On 5ch’s Hardware/Industry (Geha) board, this figure sparked replies analyzing it from various angles — the proportion of Japanese- and Chinese-language users among PC gamers, estimates of active user counts, and comparisons with home consoles. At the same time, posts mocking Nintendo and Sony users were also prominent, giving the thread a mixed atmosphere of number-crunching and console-war trolling.
On October 11, the concurrent user count on Valve’s PC game distribution platform “Steam”
hit an all-time high of “approximately 43.5 million.”
Source: news.nicovideo.jp / Original article here
What people said
Probably a lot of users who never touched PlayStation to begin with
More like an exodus from consoles in general?
Smartphones + PC are just too strong
When concurrent users were 24.8 million, active users were 120 million
so active users now would be around 300 million?
https://www.4gamer.net/games/038/G003821/20210114024/
I thought it'd be like 10x consoles, but I guess it's not that much
Pretty seriously, a lot of Japanese companies used to have the attitude of
'PC gaming is garbage — even on Steam it's all piracy hell anyway!'
There goes 'Barrier' pathetically posting his wishful thinking again (recurring poster nickname)
Nice try nitpicking about monitor arms, 'Barrier'
Not sales figures, but you can officially check download volume by country
Click on a country
Steam Download Stats
https://store.steampowered.com/stats/content/
Oh, something like this existed
Show us that gaming PC you're so proud of
Smooth 4K, mods, indie games, eroge (adult games), tons of AAA titles
Plus there are sales too — the only reason to keep a console around is a Switch 2 for Zelda
Don't need garbage like the Switch 2
PC alone is enough for me
Apparently 21%
Don't know the user count, but in terms of download volume,
China alone accounted for 460 million GB in a week, #1 in the world,
so it's probably quite a lot?
Ah, there's a breakdown by language share after all
Looking at that:
Simplified Chinese 31.39%, up 7.42%
A 7% jump is way too much… what happened there
Looking at the Japanese-language usage rate, it's 2.4%, so going purely by 'concurrent users' that's roughly 1 million
That's actually already a big jump
It used to be around 0.9% back in the day
It's probably already beating PlayStation in terms of active users
When you think that right this very moment,
a million people across Japan are playing games on Steam,
I'd say it's even surpassed Nintendo
Even Chinese games popular on PS5 (like NTE, Wuthering Waves)
and Umamusume are now playable on Steam too
That's just how it is
Steam predicted to make over $20 billion this year for first time ever
https://www.dexerto.com/gaming/steam-predicted-to-make-over-20-billion-this-year-for-first-time-ever-3414952/
Steam is projected to top $20 billion in annual revenue for the first time ever
Steam: $20 billion (¥3 trillion)
PlayStation FY26: $31.1 billion (¥4.6857 trillion)
By the way, this Valve revenue estimate is also a gross total figure
Well, PCs aren't perishable groceries you consume every day…
Roughly 1.5 billion PCs have been sold over the past 5 years
It's not like 'it's been a year since I bought mine, time for a new one!'
Background and key points of this discussion
Steam’s concurrent user count was only around 7 million back in 2013, but it has expanded rapidly over the past decade to reach 43.5 million this time. This figure simply means “the number of people logged in at a given moment,” which is a different metric from monthly active users or cumulative hardware shipments. In the thread, one comment claimed Nintendo Switch has “160 million concurrent users,” but this conflates cumulative unit sales with concurrent user counts — the two numbers are not comparable. Regarding the country/language breakdown, Steam itself does not publish official country-level statistics for concurrent users; the Chinese- and Japanese-language ratios raised in the thread are merely estimates drawn from separate data such as download volume or language-setting share. Because the raw numbers are so large, it’s easy to come away with an impression bigger than reality, so it’s worth reading them with these differences between metrics in mind.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry (Geha)) thread “[Great News] Steam’s concurrent user count hits an all-time high of “approximately 43.5 million”.”
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