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SteamSpy: $4.3bn was spent on games alone on Steam in 2017

SteamSpy: $4.3bn was spent on games alone on Steam in 2017

The amount of money spent on games on Steam in 2017 was 23 per cent higher than the year before, according to SteamSpy.

In a Medium post, the site's Sergey Galyonkin reported that $4.3bn was spent on games alone in 2017. That's just the RRP of the title, and doesn't include DLC, microtransactions and so on. Galyonkin says that the figure would jump to "well over $5bn" were this information counted.

Steam now boasts 291m players, with 22 per cent - 63m - joining in 2017. 57m people played something the platform in the last two weeks, which Galyonkin admits is lower than the figures Minecraft or League of Legends attracts, but is still absolutely huge. 31 per cent of those active players were ones who joined in 2017, too.

Though Steam is clearly bringing in a lot of new users, said new users are spending less. For every two games on median average bought by a long-time user, only one was bought by a brand new user who came in in 2017. Galyonkin attributes this to the fact that a lot of these newcomers are from developing nations such as China.

As previously reported, 7,696 new games hit Steam in 2017, 39 per cent of the 21,406 titles that had launched by the end of 2017.

The Top 100 games on the platform accounted for half of all revenue generated by Steam in 2017. And Playerunknown's Battlegrounds generated more revenue than the other nine games in the Top Ten.

Here are the Top Ten games on Steam last year, in a far more helpful format than Steam's own - ahem - useless way of presenting this information

Name - Units - Revenue

1. Playerunknown's Battlegrounds - 27,795,000 - $600m
2. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive - 12,547,000, $120m
3. Grand Theft Auto V - 3,462,000, $83m
4. Call of Duty: WWII - 840,000 - $41m
5. Sid Meier's Civizlation VI - 1,134,000 - $39m
6. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - 1,895,000, $38m
7. Divinity: Original Sin 2 - 1,004,000 - $37m
8. Ghost Recon Wildlands - 830,000 - $33m
9. Total War: Warhammer II - 643,000 - $32m
10. Middle-earth: Shadow of War - 697,000 - $31m

Check out Galyonkin's full post for more information


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PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.