Steam, revenues and users growing, Italian is non-existent

Steam revenues and users are growing strongly, especially in some territories. In particular in Asia, Central America and South America. Valve’s Kassidy Gerber told it at the Nordic Game 2024, who gave a speech explaining the performance of the strongest digital delivery platform in the world.

The key points of his speech concern the growth of Steam over the last five years. For example he indicated some of the countries where the store has grown the most by number of users: China, Serbia and the Philippines saw a 100% increase in registered users, while Japan, India and Mexico saw a 150% increase. These are enormous numbers that make it clear why Valve is looking more and more in that direction and why games coming from those territories are multiplying.

Mind-boggling numbers

“Part of our mission is to reach gamers around the world,” Gerber explained. “We invest a lot in making sure we have prices in the correct currencies, accept the best payment methods and connect our servers with our customers.”

Currently Steam supports 29 languages, but Valve wants to increase the number. He also revealed that the most used ones are different from what many believe, with Italian practically non-existent. In the lead is English with 35.08%, followed by Simplified Chinese with 28.08%, Russian with 7.91%, Castellano Spanish with 5.25% and German with 3 ,41%. As mentioned, Italian is not among the most widespread languages, i.e. it is in the “Others” item which overall includes 4.54% of users and which includes languages ​​used by less than 0.78% of users (a value which corresponds to Thai, the language with the lowest value among those indicated in the graph). So it should be clearer why many no longer translate their games into Italian.

As for revenues, the platform has seen huge growth during the pandemic period, with the same normalizing after the end of the same, without however going into deficit. Gerber highlighted how sales are one of the main drivers of growth, which is constant over the years, with sales getting better and better. For example, average revenues from summer sales grew by 23% year over year, those from autumn sales by 17% and those from winter sales by 13%. It should be underlined that the latter two still produce more revenue than the other event. Furthermore, the growth does not only concern major games, but also medium and small productions.