Valve is on the verge of a new trial. This time, Steam owners are accused of “abusing the market power of the platform.” They say that the company prohibits developers from lowering the prices of their games in other digital stores.

The Deep Rock Galactic cooperative shooter was released from early access last year, and since then the popularity of the game has only been growing. Ghost Ship Games studio reported 2 million copies sold and a MAU of 310 thousand people.The developers shared this information on their official Steam blog.

Steam presented the traditional list of the most successful new products of last month by revenue. In December, the top 20 included Red Dead Online, Worms Rumble, Haven and Cyberpunk 2077, which became one of the most popular games in the history of the store.Haven

Free prologues on Steam can be a good marketing tool to promote the game before release. Gaming expert Simon Carless analyzed their impact on sales and adding to vishlists, describing successful and failed cases.

The European Commission considered that Valve’s actions to link games to regions violate the antitrust legislation of the European Union. Together with her, five other publishers were fined for a total of almost €8 million. Valve plans to challenge the injunction.The fine was imposed based on the results of an investigation that began seven years ago.

Tomorrow Valve will start testing the official version of Steam for China. However, local users expressed their dissatisfaction with what was happening. They fear that they will soon be deprived of the opportunity to play thousands of games due to the unavailability of the international version of the store.What is the dissatisfaction of gamers?

Steam shared the results of last year. The platform described in detail what changes 2020 brought to it, and also published statistics with its business indicators. Below are the main ones.

The GitHyp website, which collects game statistics, noticed that Cyberpunk 2077 lost 79% of Steam players a month after its release. The CD Projekt game still shows excellent online, but its previous hit The Witcher 3 at one time managed to keep users many times longer.On the release day, December 10, the peak online Cyberpunk 2077 on Steam exceeded 1 million people.

During the New Year holidays, the Rust survival simulator, released back in December 2013, updated several of its own records at once. Firstly, the peak online gaming on Twitch has surpassed the mark of 1 million viewers. Secondly, the number of simultaneous players on Steam has exceeded 240 thousand.The developers announced about overcoming the milestone of 1 million simultaneous viewers on Twitch on January 3.

Steam has updated its own Christmas record for the number of simultaneous users. On December 25, there were 23 million users on the network. This is almost one and a half times more than at Christmas 2019.

A few days before the New Year, Valve decided to tell us which games were the most successful on Steam in 2020.

Direct replenishment of the wallet on Steam may not be available for some users from the beginning of next year. It’s all about “changes in Russian legislation.”

Testing of new sections of the store has started on Steam. Now the entire catalog of games is divided into 63 categories — both genre and special, like adult-only content. All this is designed to simplify the search process and make it more flexible.The updated categories became available today as part of a new experiment in Steam Labs.

The release of Cyberpunk 2077 is expected to cause a big stir among the players. Over 1 million people played the game on Steam at the same time, breaking the site’s online record on launch day.Now the online of the new CD Projekt RED game is 796,150 people, and at its peak since the release, 1,003,264 Steam users played it at the same time.

The developers of most projects on Steam fit into a budget of up to $ 100 thousand, Xsolla stated in its research. We are talking about 67.5% of the games of the store.

Although the peak online Fall Guys continues to fall, the authors of the battle royale are not discouraged. The other day they shared a new record — sales of the game on Steam exceeded 10 million copies.

In two months after the release, Marvel’s Avengers lost almost the entire audience. The number of simultaneous players has dropped by 96%, and the average online now rarely exceeds 700 people.Last weekend, the maximum online Marvel’s Avengers on Steam was 1,190 players.

Indie horror Phasmophobia, which conquered the Steam chart and was created by one person, has sold over 2 million copies. Due to the great popularity, the developer had to postpone the full release and focus on finalizing the project.The success of Phasmophobia was told by its creator Dknighter, the founder of Kinetic Games studio and its sole developer.

Valve went to meet the game studios. Starting today, the Steam Playtest function has officially started working in her store. With its help, developers can invite users to test games without keys and external mailings.