Yesterday, Valve printed its yearly “Steam Yr In Overview” weblog put up, a retrospective highlighting Steam characteristic additions and buyer information tendencies from 2024. Calling 2024 “a yr of progress,” Valve stated Steam’s variety of peak concurrent customers is almost twice what it was in March 2020—and final yr, all these customers have been taking part in extra new video games than ever.
“2024 was the Steam platform’s finest yr ever when it comes to prospects shopping for newly launched video games,” Valve stated. 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 occasions larger than it was in 2014. Greater 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 supplied a chart (see above) exhibiting regular will increase in yearly new launch revenues since 2017.
What the chart would not embrace, nonetheless, 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 exterior their new launch window, it is an incomplete image. If reside service recreation revenues elevated by even bigger percentages, for instance, these larger new launch gross sales would’ve truly accounted for a lowering portion of Steam’s income.
Valve does publish a yearly checklist of Steam’s greatest earners, and 2024’s highest tier comprises a lot of new video games that we all know have been hits: Palworld, Helldivers 2, Area Marine 2, Black Fable Wukong. However the regular suspects are there, too: Dota 2, Counter-Strike 2, Apex Legends, PUBG. And though it’s technically a brand new launch, Name of Obligation: 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 Name of Obligation launcher.
Nonetheless, the pattern of accelerating new launch income supplies some further 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 might sound, it is truly up from 2023, the place solely 9% of play time was spent in video games launched that yr. (It is down from 17% in 2022, although.)
It is 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 reside service closures—just like the not too long ago introduced Spectre Divide shuttering—brings an finish to the doomed pursuit of the following without end recreation. However lots of the new video games within the 2024 Steam finest sellers checklist, like Throne and Liberty, The First Descendant, and As soon as Human, are nonetheless chasing that very same objective. By Valve’s definition, their first 30 days of microtransaction gross sales would depend as new launch income.
With out a extra holistic dataset, we will not say whether or not rising new launch income signifies a coming sea change or if the water’s transferring with the identical tides.
