This Year’s Steam Autumn Sale Was Valve’s Biggest Yet

It’s no secret that digital gaming storefront Steam enjoys a ridiculous amount of traffic with each of its seasonal sales. But what may come as a surprise was the fact that this year’s Steam Autumn Sale was its most lucrative yet.

The 2020 Autumn Sale was “the biggest-ever in terms of revenue for developers and publishers,” Valve writes in a blog post. During the sale, concurrent user numbers topped out at nearly 24 million, about 7 million more than 2019’s Autumn Sale. About a million people made their first Steam purchase or microtransaction during the sale, a 33% boost from 2019.

Valve credits “certain factors” for the Autumn Sale’s success, including quarantine in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, a series of games finding success and hitting their stride, and a resurgence of popularity for older games.

The Steam developer also continued to refine its personalized game recommendations. The 2020 Autumn Sale added a series of genre hubs to make it easier for would-be buyers to browse through the types and categories of games they’d enjoy, which “drove as many add-to-carts as our front-page highlighted daily deals,” Valve says.

The Autumn Sale also ran alongside the Steam Awards, during which more than 5.3 million voters visited the site and cast more than 30 million nominations. Additionally, over 1.6 million users added game reviews to the site in 2020,” which is a huge injection of positive recommendations for games big and small,” according to Valve.