Within the last couple of weeks, the public awareness of the COVID-19 outbreak has grown substantially. As a result, more and more restaurants and other establishments have begun to shut down as various governments from around the world continue to encourage people to stay indoors. With a significant portion of the world population now finding themselves with a lot of free time, various online platforms like Steam have begun to reap the benefits.
Steam is one of the most influential and easily accessible gaming platforms in existence. It is a video game distribution service developed by Valve and was originally launched back in September of 2003. In 2020, Steam has become the epicenter of online gaming with various games being bought and sold at ridiculously low prices. In fact, most games on Steam are listed at such a low price that back in December of 2019, a US Congressman stole re-election campaign money and spent it on Steam games.
With how many cheap and affordable games there are on Steam, the platform has begun to appeal to many new users. Now, obviously Steam games are accessed exclusively via PC, so while the COVID-19 continues to hinder the world, Steam users have begun to log on and play Steam games in order to pass the time. This has led to a huge spike in user activity and has broken a record for the most amount of concurrent active users on Steam.
Steam recently announced that the platform has now registered over twenty-two million active users. This breaks the previous record of nearly twenty million registered users, which was reported last week. The record marks a major achievement for Steam as a platform.
Since the early 2010s, which marked the release of various titles developed by Valve, such as Portal 2, Counterstrike Global Offensive, and DOTA 2, Steam has grown to be a household name amongst video game enthusiasts. With so many popular and high-selling games to choose from, some might argue that this is the premier platform for anyone with even a remote interest in gaming.
However, it is rather sad knowing that this increase in Steam’s user traffic is the result of the COVID-19 outbreak. Ever since this disease began to spread, it has grown to become quite a hindrance worldwide. So many different gaming events have had to be canceled as a result, including the highly anticipated E3 2020. Hopefully, this disease will soon pass and life will go on as it was before.
Source: Video Game Chronicles
