Apparently Steam is losing sales according to data from 2019.
Last year was not the most pleasant for the Steam digital distribution service because presumably, the Epic Games Store, which opened at the end of 2018, played a significant role in this. No matter how much it is criticized, it seems that they know how to attract an audience – which is why there are constant free giveaways and a whole bunch of temporary exclusives. Whether this is the case or not is unclear, however, the fact is that in 2019, Valve users purchased half as many games as 2018.
According to SteamSpy, in 2019, 8415 games were released on Steam, which is only 248 items more than last year. This is a bad indicator, because over the past five years, annual growth has been about two thousand titles. Such a huge gap is a serious reason to worry for Valve.
The total number of sales and free activations almost halved: in 2018, people bought 242 million games through Steam, and in 2019 this fell to 127 million. Compared with the results for 2017, this is a three and a half times drop since two years ago, statistics indicated 440 million games being sold.
With this data, 2019 was the worst year for Steam in the last 12 years. The next worst time was in 2008, when there were 71.6 million games sold. It is unclear how Valve will get out of this situation.
