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Steam hits 132m monthly active players during 2021

Steam hits 132m monthly active players during 2021

PC platform Steam attracted 132 million monthly active players last year.

That's according to Valve's Year in Review for 2021, which says that the service saw a 15 per cent increase in monthly active users. Steam brought in 69 million daily active users, an increase on the 62.6 million it achieved in 2020. People spent 38 billion hours playing on Steam, a 21 per cent increase year-on-year.

Valve also reports that it saw 2.6 million first time purchasers every single month during 2021, around the same rate that was seen during 2020 during the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. In total, there were 31.2 million new purchasers on Steam last year.

"Player spending on games rose 27% compared to 2020, growing even more than playtime did," Valve wrote.

"That growth wasn't just due to existing players, either - Steam saw 2.6M first-time purchasers each month of 2021, roughly the same rate of new purchaser growth we saw in 2020 as the global pandemic unfolded."


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Forbes-Calvin is a freelance writer and photographer, mostly operating within the games industry. Over his career, he has written for the likes of MCV, Eurogamer, GamesIndustry.biz, The Observer, VGC and Esquire. That's on top of writing books for Dark Horse on RuneScape, Assassin's Creed, Dead Island 2 and more.