Yesterday, Valve revealed its yearly “Steam Year In Review” weblog put up, a retrospective highlighting Steam function additions and buyer information tendencies from 2024. Calling 2024 “a yr of development,” Valve mentioned Steam’s variety of peak concurrent customers is almost twice what it was in March 2020—and final yr, all these customers have been enjoying extra new video games than ever.
“2024 was the Steam platform’s greatest yr ever by way of clients shopping for newly launched video games,” Valve mentioned. In 2024, new launch income on Steam, which Valve defines as gross sales income from the primary 30 days after a product’s launch and any pre-purchases, was ten instances increased than it was in 2014. More than 500 video games earned greater than $250,000 in new launch gross sales, with greater than 200 of these incomes greater than $1 million—a rise of 27% and 15% from 2023’s numbers, respectively.
Valve additionally offered a chart (see above) exhibiting regular will increase in yearly new launch revenues since 2017.
What the chart does not embrace, nevertheless, is any labeling to point what these income figures truly have been. And with none figures or bars indicating gross sales income from video games outdoors their new launch window, it is an incomplete image. If dwell service sport revenues elevated by even bigger percentages, for instance, these higher new launch gross sales would’ve truly accounted for a reducing portion of Steam’s income.
Valve does publish a yearly record of Steam’s greatest earners, and 2024’s highest tier comprises quite a lot of new video games that we all know have been hits: Palworld, Helldivers 2, Space Marine 2, Black Myth Wukong. But the same old suspects are there, too: Dota 2, Counter-Strike 2, Apex Legends, PUBG. And though it’s technically a brand new launch, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 hardly looks like one given we have gotten a brand new CoD yearly for the previous 20 years, they usually’re now all bundled into one Call of Duty launcher.
Still, the pattern of accelerating new launch income offers some extra context for the chilling reveal throughout final yr’s Steam Replay that solely 15% of consumer play time was spent in video games launched in 2024. As dire as that quantity may appear, it is truly up from 2023, the place solely 9% of play time was spent in video games launched that yr. (It’s down from 17% in 2022, although.)
It’s tempting to learn the pattern as proof of the video games business vibe shift we prophesied on the finish of final yr, the place the persevering with string of dwell service closures—just like the just lately introduced Spectre Divide shuttering—brings an finish to the doomed pursuit of the following ceaselessly sport. But lots of the new video games within the 2024 Steam greatest sellers record, like Throne and Liberty, The First Descendant, and Once Human, are nonetheless chasing that very same purpose. By Valve’s definition, their first 30 days of microtransaction gross sales would rely as new launch income.
Without a extra holistic dataset, we won’t say whether or not rising new launch income signifies a coming sea change or if the water’s transferring with the identical tides.
