{"id":36809,"date":"2018-07-31T21:38:00","date_gmt":"2018-07-31T21:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/323365"},"modified":"2018-07-31T21:38:00","modified_gmt":"2018-07-31T21:38:00","slug":"steam-user-count-has-decreased-17-percent-since-january","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2018\/07\/31\/steam-user-count-has-decreased-17-percent-since-january\/","title":{"rendered":"Steam user count has decreased 17 percent since January"},"content":{"rendered":"

Steam is currently seeing a big decline in the\u00a0number of people playing games (and even having Steam\u00a0open on their computers) since January of this year.<\/p>\n

As Steam Spy creator Sergey Galyonkin\u00a0points out<\/a>, it’s not unusual to see a drop in players during the warmer season, but this year\u2019s summer decline sees numbers going down by 17 percent, compared with 9 percent\u00a0last year.<\/p>\n

Data from the past three years logged by SteamDB<\/a>\u00a0shows that Steam typically sees user counts peak annually in January, decline or stagnate in the summer, and then increase toward\u00a0the beginning\u00a0of the new year.<\/p>\n

If there’s a much larger decline this summer, it could imply\u00a0Steam\u2019s usual rate of growth is slowing down, or that the platform simply hit its\u00a0massive user peak earlier in the year from huge\u00a0sales\u00a0of\u00a0PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

The battle royale title is still the most popular game on Steam, but its numbers have decreased significantly since earlier this year.\u00a0Galyonkin notes<\/a> that the latter seems unlikely, as this decrease by itself\u00a0isn’t enough\u00a0to explain Steam\u2019s current decline.<\/p>\n

It’s likely that Steam’s numbers will increase as the end of the year grows closer, but as for now, there\u2019s no clear indication of what’s causing\u00a0user numbers to dwindle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Steam is currently seeing a big decline in the\u00a0number of people playing games (and even having Steam\u00a0open on their computers) since January of this year. As Steam Spy creator Sergey Galyonkin\u00a0points out, it’s not unusual to see a drop in players during the warmer season, but this year\u2019s summer decline sees numbers going down by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":36810,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36809","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36809","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36809"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36809\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}