As part of his speech at GDC 2018, Sergey Galenkin, director of publishing strategy at Epic Games and author of the SteamSpy service, said that 2017 was a record year in terms of financial indicators for Steam. The digital store of desktop games earned $4.3 billion during this period.

In February, the PvP shooter PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS faced an outflow of the audience for the first time. Prior to that, the number of PUBG players had been growing continuously for almost a year since the game appeared on Steam Early Access.

Sales of the RimWorld space colonists simulator by the independent studio Ludeon Studios exceeded 1 million copies. The alpha version of the game was released in 2013, and since 2016 it has appeared in Steam early access.

Steam Spy reports: in 2017, 7.6 thousand games were released on the Steam platform. This is more than the total number of releases in the Valve store for the previous 2 years.

In 2017, the rating of games with the most massive online on Steam was replenished with only one new title — the “royal battle” of PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS from Bluehole Studios.

Steam started the year with records. The number of simultaneous users on the platform in the first week of 2018 exceeded 18.5 million people. This is the largest indicator in the history of the service, according to the Steam Database resource.

Prepare for the unexpected. The Steam digital PC games store has published several selections of the best-selling games of the past year. In addition to the obvious titles, like PUBG and ARK, there are enough not so well-known names in it.

The rating service GitHyp has brought disappointing statistics: VR versions of popular titles on Steam are hardly collected online by several hundred gamers.

The Curators Connect feature has been launched on Steam, which allows game developers to send game keys to participants of the curated program without leaving the platform.

The analytical site Steam Spy was cut off from the data of the Valve game store for unknown reasons. This was told by the creator of the service Sergey Galenkin on Twitter.

Bitcoin is breaking records in value, but they can no longer pay on Steam. The largest digital game store has stopped payments in cryptocurrency due to the instability of the exchange rate and high fees for transactions in bitcoins.

Valve has added digital gift certificates with a fixed face value to the Steam game store. They can be used to replenish the Steam wallet of another user of the platform.

Since the beginning of 2017, over 6 thousand new games have been released on Steam — 40% more than published on the Valve platform for the whole of 2016.

Cuphead’s two-dimensional shooter from MDHR Studio sold 125 thousand copies in three days of sales on Steam.

The second game of independent developer Tom Francis (Tom Francis) Heat Signature in the first week after release overtook the sales of his debut title Gunpoint, also successful.

Valve will add histograms with the dynamics of positive and negative ratings to the Steam game pages. This will help to resist the “review-bombing” — the collapse of the game’s rating with a large number of negative reviews.

The multiplayer survival shooter Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds on Steam simultaneously gathered 1.3 million people in the game on September 16, surpassing the similar record of MOBA Dota 2.

The head of the publishing division of Epic Games in Eastern Europe and the author of the analytical service Steam Spy, Sergey Galenkin, presented data according to which the average income of indie developers on Steam has decreased by 50% over the past 2 years.

According to Daniel Ahmad, an analyst at Niko Partners, more than 1.3 thousand new games have been released on Steam since the launch of the Steam Direct service.