With 2019 now firmly behind us many companies and organisations are releasing information about how they did in the past year. One of them is Steam with its “2019 Year in Review” post.

The most interesting number, to us anyway, is the amount of people leaving reviews for the games they have played. Previously the number of reviews left on the platform were around 17 thousand per day, but this jumped by 300 percent to 70 thousand.

This increase is attributed to the redesign of the personal Library which entered open beta in September of last year. The changes to the Library brought features such as as the “What’s New” section which showed players developer updates for games they own.

What drove the increase in reviews, however, are new prompts to review or re-review games based on certain criteria.

The full 2019 Year in Review post can be read here, but it’s a rather long and winding tale. To save you some time we’ve summed up the big news and numbers into a handy list below.

By the numbers – Steam 2019 Year in Review:

• Active users increased to nearly 95 million
• Steam labs served 2.7 billion impressions, 57 million views, helped with 6.1 million wishlist adds to 29 million+ games
• Tags helped drive 121 million visits to DLC pages
• Best of month breakdowns helped lesser-known titles increase wishlist activity by 50 percent.
• Steam Mobile Chat app was installed a million times.
• An average of one million push notifications are sent by the Mobile Chat App every day.
• 4.3 million items uploaded to the Workshop.
• Steam events and announcements reach players 8 billion times. 5 billion impressions occur in the new Steam library redesign.
• 44 review bombs stopped by the new review system.
• 3.7 million players used Remote Play. 2.3 Million players used Remote Play Together.
• 300+ games now support touchscreen controls via the Steam Link App.
• More than 6 500 games are Linux compatible now.
• SteamVR had more than a hundred beta updates.
• 20 789 726 718 (almost 21 billion) hours of play on Steam in 2019.

As for 2020 Steam has provided some details about what it has planned for the rest of the year.

First party data deep dives, better support for game soundtracks, Steam Trust matchmaking software spreading, and more are all on the list.

Updates and changes are also coming to Steam Labs, SteamVR, the mobile app and sale events.

Of particular interest here is the data aspect. The way it is worded makes it seem that Steam is looking to supplement the work of places like SteamDB and Steam Charts.

“Data Deep Dives – We’ve seen a lot of analysis from third parties that have taken a stab at figuring out how games are doing on Steam (and overall health of the platform), based on the limited amount of data that is publicly available. Since we have access to more data, we thought it would be useful to do our own analysis and share the results as a multi-part series of blog posts,” the post reads.