Steam was started over 15 years ago as a small platform which provided users a way to buy games, but today Steam is a billion-dollar company that has 90 million active monthly users and 18.5 million peak concurrent users globally.
That's why when they released a report looking back at 2018 and ahead to 2019, we were very interested. After all, it's a big year for them what with the Epic Games Store offering major competition, not to mention Discord as well.
Due to the high traffic that Steam consistently receives, one of the highest priorities the crew outlined was making their store is as dynamic as possible. "Ninety million different people visiting Steam each month means the store needs to be dynamic enough to cater a diverse set of interests and give games from developers big and small, a chance to find their audience," the post reads.
As well as improvements to the store, Valve highlights that improvements to their Steam Chat was a huge focal point. Some of the noteworthy changes were a vastly improved group chat, a more flexible friends list, and a completely rewritten voice chat system, which should provide the user with higher quality and a more secure voice chat experience. Alongside this there are plans to combat toxicity by introducing more moderation tools and providing a full-time moderation team to make sure forums and the Steam community in general remain healthy.
More ways to play are a huge interest for Valve too. Steam Play allows users to play games using whichever form of controller they wish, from a traditional Xbox controller all the way to Rockband instruments. The new version of Steam Play that was released in August has expanded vastly from 24 titles to over 3,400 games before the new year, giving users the freedom to play in whichever way they desire. The exact ways in which users play their games can be seen below:
As for the future of Steam over the next year, many new plans have been outlined as well as some expansion on the new features of 2018. By introducing a new algorithm Steam plans on creating a new recommendation engine that can match players to games based on their interests. Likewise, plans are in place to create a new mobile app that will allow users to use the improved chat whilst on the go. Also, using the tech that was created to optimise the new Steam Chat, plans on reworking the Steam Library in a change coming to the Steam client are seemingly on the way. Finally, through a partnership with Perfect World, Valve is planning on bringing its services to China, with more details promised over the coming months.
This should all keep Valve very busy, and with Epic breathing down their necks they'll need to do everything to stay ahead of the game. It'll be a very interesting year, whatever happens, and we'll have to wait and see what Epic has up their sleeve as well.
Are these changes looking promising?
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