Steam: Do I Look Nervous?Â
Steam is on top of the world. The most popular online retailer has just crushed its previous player count record by more than 300,000 people. The previous record was a staggering 18.5 million people sometime in 2018. This great news for Steam. The sudden emergence of The Epic Games Store has convinced many that Steam’s days as the top dog on PC were numbered. However, it now seems that Valve doesn’t have much to worry about for the foreseeable future.
It is important to note that the player count on Steam does not mean that there were 18.8 million people actually playing games all at the same time. But there were that many people on Steam at the same time. The number for those who were actually playing games was somewhere around 5.2 million. The record for most people playing games at once is 7 million. Still a very impressive number.
Steam has been at the helm of PC gaming for almost two decades now and it seems as though it is not slowing down. It has undoubtedly lost some of its business to other online retailers but these new discoveries have revealed that Valve is not going anywhere anytime soon. Once a company becomes that big and influential, it is hard to dethrone them. Much in the way companies like Facebook or Google. Some things really are too big to fail.
There is always a chance that Valve could fade away in the future. But if that does ever happen it is going to be a long way away. There is really no reason to believe that The Epic Games Store or anyone else is going to serve as a serious competitor for a while.