It’s the first year in a looong time that sales didn’t increase significantly actually.
The number of active Steam users, btw is around 200 million. I forget what the current definition of active is for Valve, but I think it’s game owners logged in within the past 3 months? And that that number continue to increase.
I think this year it’s likely a few factors:
It’s likely a lot of the new Steam users are coming from outside Europe and the US and they tend to gravitate and spend money on free to play games (and those figures are not counted by Steam spy). It could very well be that micro transactions and DLC played a larger role this year than last.
Some of the biggest, most popular games on PC this year were not on Steam. From Battlefield to Overwatch.
It’s possible the user base is becoming more accustomed to/more willing to play games from other store fronts, especially when big sales are available. Origin/GOG/Ubisoft, etc might be getting bigger? Who knows. Wish we had figured from them too.
It’s possible that the flood of not so good games is having an effect on the number of eyeballs on the store. I know I pretty much stopped looking at it, except for the top sellers list. I usually learn about a game elsewhere, and then go buy it. But this means less impulse buys, and probably missing out on games I would have purchased had I seen them on the store.
While I agree with Valve’s stance on not being a strict gate keeper like a console manufacturer, I think they should have a preliminary screening process that at least weeds out most trash like free asset turn overs, and broken games with no content.
Some big console game hitters also came out and it’s possible PC gamers with multiple systems spent their money there this year.
What constitutes a “premium game” in that quote? Is that just a weird way of saying “Not free to play”? Because that seems sortof redundant, but I’m not sure what else it would mean.
On a sortof related note, has anyone done this Humble Monthly thing? They have Xcom 2 “and a bunch of other stuff” for $12. Do I have to subscribe for some duration or can I give them $12, get Xcom 12, and walk?
Pretty much. By buying this month’s pack, you’re subscribing but you can cancel without any issue and only get this month’s bundle with XCOM 2. You won’t find out what the other games are until the first Friday of next months (Feb 3rd) when they get revealed but, if you’re happy with $12 for XCOM 2 then the rest is just gravy.