On January 2nd, 2021, the Steam platform reached another major milestone, breaking 25 million concurrent users for the first time ever.
According to SteamDB, the platform peaked at approximately 25.4 million users, 7.4 million of which were in-game at the time. The graph shows the steady growth enjoyed by Steam over the years.
As a reminder, the Steam Winter Sale is still ongoing and will end on January 5th. Valve also put out a new Steam Labs Experiment dubbed 'Exploring Sales' for this occasion, which should provide a better browsing experience.
New Ways to Browse During the Holidays
Each holiday sale, Steam features thousands of titles on discount. As part of this year’s Autumn Sale we introduced over a dozen genre- and theme-specific sale pages to help players browse and discover our most popular games on discount during the event. We found these themed pages drove more game store page visits during the sale than all but one other Steam store point of discovery – the grid of featured games at the top of the home page.
Given the popularity of these themed pages, we’ve introduced more of them in this year’s Winter Sale, and we’ve added some smarts so we’re able to now list them based on their likely relevance to you.
Genres, Themes, Features, & More
Once you arrive at one of these pages during the Winter Sale, such as this one featuring the most popular Winter Sale Co-Op Games, you’ll discover a number of ways to browse the hundreds of games it features. Tabs offer common sub-genres, themes, or other tags shared by the hundreds of games featured on each page. Sections of these pages in some cases also display titles which all share a common theme such as viewpoint, player support, or additional themes. And because there are so many great games to feature on each of these pages, we’ve also introduced faceted browsing.
Faceted Browsing: Searching while Exploring
Faceted browsing lets you tell Steam what you’re looking for as you browse, by quickly filtering titles along a variety of axes such as visual style, theme, mood, player support, and more. Concepts can be selected across categories to serve as quick AND search operations, while concepts can be selected within categories to serve as quick OR search operations.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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