Steam Has Grown More Than 150% in India in the Last Five Years
The video game digital distribution service by Valve is a popular choice for PC gamers in India and around the world.
India is among the regions where video game distribution service Steam has seen a massive growth of more than 150% when it comes to new users from 2019 to 2024.
Kassidy Gerber, part of Steam's business development team at Valve, delivered a “Platform Update 2024” talk at the Nordic Game 2024 Spring conference on May 24, 2024 (thanks, Game World Observer and GameDiscoverCo). During this talk, Gerber outlined Steam’s key growth regions with India showing a more than 150% increase in new users.
Mission on Steam and new revenue estimates
Gerber outlined that “part of” the “mission on Steam is to reach gamers around the world.” She added, “We invest a lot in making sure we price in the right currencies, accept the right payment methods, and connect our servers close to our customers.” We have seen this with the recommended regional pricing from Steam in most of the regions it operates in.
Other regions where Steam has experienced 150% growth for new users include Japan, Ecuador, Mexico, Chile, Israel, and Pakistan. Regions where Steam has grown more than 100% include China, Serbia, Spain, the Philippines, Vietnam, Peru, and the U.S.
Steam is growing rapidly, with significant user base increases in Asia, Southeast Asia, Central America, and South America over the last five years. Peak concurrent users on Steam have reached 36.3 million, with 10 million in-game simultaneously. GameDiscoverCo also shared a new estimate of the total gross platform for Steam in 2023 as USD 12 billion. It outlined other numbers, including the USD 6.5 billion from Microsoft in 2021 and USD 9 billion from VGInsights in 2023.
Valve executive highlights the importance of Localisation
The talk also highlighted the importance of adding regional language support to Steam so that gamers can use the store in their native language. While Valve does not support Hindi, its rapid growth can be a promising factor. Gerber noted that Steam is working on adding support for more languages, increasing the number of supported languages from 29 at the time of writing.
Steam is noticing sustained growth
Kassidy also shared a chart of global revenue, showcasing the Year-on-Year growth from 2018 to 2024. Gerber highlighted that Steam has noticed sustained growth even after the bump the platform saw during the pandemic.
Other aspects discussed during the talk include visibility on Steam and the importance of discounts and sales, including seasonal, theme-based, and custom sales. We also saw a brief part on Next-Fest, the launch of Steam Deck, and more. Valve noted that it is “working hard to make Steam Deck available in more countries,” and we can only hope that it comes to India someday. You can watch the complete talk below.
Steam's popularity is driven by regional pricing for many games, frequent sales, and the absence of advertisements on the platform. Focusing on India, factors like affordable regional pricing, support for local payment methods, and a growing PC gaming community contribute to its success.
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Rayan Sayyed is a staff writer for IGN India with a primary focus on Asian entertainment spanning from anime, manga, games to films and dramas from the East. You can reach out to him at rayan_sayyed@ign.com, or find him on Twitter @rayanaver and Instagram @rayansayyed.
