The PC gaming platform has continued to go from strength to strength. Matching the trends seen within the console gaming market, PC gaming is bigger than ever, with Valve sitting comfortably at the top thanks to the near ubiquity of its Steam service. Unsurprisingly, 2022 represented the biggest year ever for the platform in many ways – including data delivery – with Valve revealing that almost 45 exabytes of data was downloaded last year.
As it does annually, Valve released a Steam year in review, with this entry of course focusing on 2022’s efforts. The post released is lengthy and goes over the many changes and improvements brought to the service during the past year (such as changes to Steam’s Big Picture Mode; Dynamic Cloud Sync; the mobile app and more).For our purposes the most interesting statistic released reveals that over the course of 2022 more than 44.7 exabytes of data was downloaded and transferred – an increase of 36% compared to 2021.
To put this figure into more manageable terms, 44.7 exabytes would equate to every single one of the 8 billion people on Earth downloading a 5.5 gigabyte game – a large sum indeed.
Despite this huge achievement, perhaps the more impressive revelation by Valve was the fact that the Steam storefront saw an average of 83,000 new first-time purchasers every single day of the year – and yes, this only includes people who spent actual money on the service. The full list of stats released by Valve can be found HERE.
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KitGuru says: How much data do you think you’ve downloaded from Steam in 2022? Are you able to visualise 44.7 exabytes? Let us know down below.