Steam's 2020 Autumn Sale was its biggest yet

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Valve's latest Steamworks Development blog provides a look at some of the numbers from this year's Autumn Sale. Normally a footnote compared to the Winter Sale, the Autumn Sale actually featured some pretty decent discounts this year and was apparently "the biggest-ever in terms of revenue for developers and publishers". Ongoing COVID-19 quarantines in many countries probably helped the sale, which overlapped with a Black Friday and Cyber Monday that saw online shopping up 22 percent according to Adobe Analytics.

Steam's concurrent user numbers reached almost 24 million, which is "about 7 million more simultaneous users" than the same time last year. Valve also said that, "just shy of a million players bought a game or made a microtransaction on Steam for the very first time", which is apparently an increase of a third on the same period in 2019. Steam's new pages dedicated to categories sorted by genre seem to be working, as Valve reports "the genre hub pages drove as many add-to-carts as our front-page highlighted daily deals" during the sale.

Valve also shared figures related to the Steam Awards nominations, which ran simultaneously with the Autumn Sale. Over 5.3 million voters took part, and thanks to a badge that could be leveled up by leaving a user review for one of the games you nominated, over 1.6 million people were motivated to add user reviews.

The final nominees for 2020's Steam Awards are being revealed one category per day, and voting will run from December 22 at 10AM PST through to January 3 at 9AM PST. Whoever nominated Untitled Goose Game for the Sit Back and Relax Award had a very different experience of that raucous honking party than my household did.