Valve shared some data figures comparing it to previous Autumn Sales from prior years.
Valve’s latest Steamworks Development blog provides a look at some of the numbers from this year’s Autumn Sale. Normally a footnote compared to the Winter Sale, the Autumn Sale actually featured some pretty decent discounts this year and was apparently “the biggest-ever in terms of revenue for developers and publishers”. With several big title releases, Ongoing COVID-19 quarantines in many countries probably helped the sale, which overlapped with a Black Friday and Cyber Monday that saw online shopping up 22 percent according to Adobe Analytics.
Steam’s concurrent user numbers reached almost 24 million, which is “about 7 million more simultaneous users” than the same time last year. Valve also said that, “just shy of a million players bought a game or made a microtransaction on Steam for the very first time”, which is apparently an increase of a third on the same period in 2019. Steam’s new pages dedicated to categories sorted by genre seem to be working, as Valve reports “the genre hub pages drove as many add-to-carts as our front-page highlighted daily deals” during the sale.
Valve also announced their success of user engagement with their badges, the badge related to feedback for video games and community interaction. ” More than 1.6 million customers unlocked a badge level this year by providing feedback for a game they love, which is a huge injection of positive recommendations for games big and small.