LATEST VIDEOS GAMES

Steam numbers are on a downward trend, and it’s a much bigger decline than we’ve seen in the past. What’s to blame? As with a lot of industry trends at this point, you can probably point to battle royale as one major contributor, though that may not be the full story.

To be clear, Steam isn’t hurting for players, and numbers are up overall from a year ago. The first Sunday in July last year peaked with 14,073,632 users logged into Steam, while the same peak this year brought 16,358,317. But both those numbers come in the midst of Steam’s usual summer decline - and this year’s dip has been much more significant than the one last year.

If you want to help the Steam numbers - or just enjoy some cool games - check out the best free Steam games.

As Steam Spy creator Sergey Galyonkin notes, this year’s summer decline sees numbers going down by 17%, compared with 9% last year. Based on three years of data at SteamDB, Steam tends to see user counts peak annually in January, decline or simply stangate in the summer, and reach new heights at the start of the new year. If we have a much larger decline this summer, it means Steam’s usual rate of growth is slowing down.

Or, perhaps, the numbers are simply paying the price for Steam’s massive user peak earlier this year - courtesy, of course, of PUBG’s sales numbers. PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is still the most popular game on Steam, but its industry-shaking player numbers have bled off significantly since their height earlier this year.

from PCGamesN https://ift.tt/2mYsFr7