Quick Answer
How many people use Steam in 2025?
There are around 120.4 million monthly active players on Steam.
Steam, the online gaming platform got its start in 2003 and was launched by the Valve Corporation.
It started as a small platform for Valve to offer game updates, but has turned into the biggest and most popular computer gaming platform on the planet.
In the next few paragraphs, you will be reading about how many people use Steam and other relevant information about the computer gaming platform.
Let’s dig into this data and see what we find.
Steam Monthly Active Users: How Many People Use Steam in 2025?
- Each month, there are around 120.4 million active monthly players on Steam.
- On a daily basis, around 69 million players are on the platform.
- In September 2021, Steam peaked at 26.09 million concurrent users.
- This data comes directly from Steam, and shows it over a 48-hour period each day.
- New Steam users sign up to the tune of 1.5 million users each month.
- In 2018, Steam had a reported 132 million unique registered users.
- An undisclosed number of users play via a VPN for Steam.
What is Steam?
As mentioned at the start of the article, Steam is an online computer gaming platform created by Valve.
Steam’s library in the US has 92,196 titles across categories. In March 2021, Steam had 50,361 games available.
Just in the first couple of months in 2022, 1,514 game titles were released.
The number of games by genre looks like this:
- Indie: 32,712
- Action: 19,571
- Adventure: 17,092
- Simulation: 8,904
- Strategy: 8,888
- RPG: 7,801
- Sports: 2,265
Steam hosts its games via the cloud.
One of its users’ favorite features is that it allows users to use any computer to play games on Steam that they buy and download to their accounts.
Steam also stores games on its platform so that you can save space on your computer.
When you use Steam, you simply download and install the gaming interface, or app on your computer.
After you do that, you will have access to a full library of computer games, forums, and even software.
Who Can Use Steam?
You must be at least 13 years old to use Steam, though not all games are suitable for young teens.
Steam is as safe as any other gaming platform when parents make use of the parental controls. It depends on what you allow your children to watch and play.
It’s advisable for parents to take advantage of parental controls since there are forums and chats on Steam that can include language or content you don’t want your child exposed to.
Steam Demographics: Who Uses Steam?
Not only do you need to know the number or Steam users, but you also need to know who uses it.
So, this section will address a few Steam user demographics for marketers to use for creating marketing strategies if they’re so inclined.
Steam Users by Gender
As of December 2021, most of the gamers on Steam are male at 88.1% compared to 2.4% female and 9.5% unknown.
Only 4% of Steam’s traffic comes from women, 46% comes from unknown/unidentified gender, and 50% men.
Steam Users by Age
2021 data reports that the average age of Steam users is between 20 and 9 years old, which accounts for about 37% adult users.
Here is a breakdown of age groups on Steam.
- 18-19: 8%
- 20-29: 37%
- 30-39: 32%
- 40-49: 15%
- 50-59: 7%
- 60-64: 1%
Therefore, most users are between 20 and 29 years old with the 30 to 39 crowd being the second largest.
Steam Users by Country
The United States makes up most of the users on Steam, with China coming in second. Let’s look at Steam users by country.
- United States: 14.43%
- China: 11.64%
- Russia: 9.57%
- Brazil: 4.77%
- Germany: 4.16%
- Canada: 3.11%
- France: 3.04%
- United Kingdom: 3%
- Poland: 2.6%
- Turkey: 2.38%
This data is from April 2018, so it’s likely larger in some regions than shown here.
Time Spent
Another bit of data that helps you learn more about Steam is how long users spend on the platform/app. Here is where we will cover those figures.
31.3 billion hours of gaming were logged in 2020 on Steam.
It’s grown by over 50% since last year, outweighing the 26.31% growth in monthly active users.
Steam Users by Game: Most Played Games
Now we will discuss the most played games on the Steam platform.
Counter Strike: Global Defense and Dota 2 are at the top of the most played games on Steam.
Let’s look at the breakdown of Steam users by game.
- Counter Strike: Global Defense: 1.3 million
- Dota 2: 1.29 million
- Cyberpunk 2077: 1.05 million
- Valheim: 502,000
- Terraria; 490,000
- Fallout 4: 473,000
- Life is Strange 2: 469,000
- Among Us: 447,000
- POSTAL: 412,000
- World of Warships: 379,000
- Grand Theft Auto V: 364,000
- HITMAN 2: 361,000
- Kathy Rain: 334,000
- Monster Hunter: World: 320,000
These numbers change daily when looking at concurrent players.
Conclusion
We have addressed the question of how many people use Steam in 2025 for gaming along with other data that gives you a good overview of the platform.
You know what it is, how it works, and who can play on the platform.
Marketers can use this data for creating content to promote Steam online for gaming companies.
As a user, you may find this data interesting since you are part of what we found out and shared with our readers here.
Steam is the biggest of computer gaming apps and platforms with thousands of games across multiple genres to match virtually anyone’s interest in gaming.
Do you already use Steam? Are you thinking about installing the gaming engine on your computer?
If so, you aren’t alone as these statistics about how many people use Steam have shown.
Sources
Backlinko | Common Sense Media | Niche Gamer |
PC Gamer | Stat Investor | Statista |
Steam DB | Steam Spy | Video Games Stats |
Zippia |