Valve has launched a bunch of fascinating data in its Steam Year in Review 2021, together with controller utilization statistics. In response to Valve, there are presently 48 million controllers “registered by Steam customers,” and so they’re utilized in over 10% of all gaming periods. I ponder what number of of these are Steam controllers?
Again in February, a Steamworks replace added a brand new controller usage stats page the place builders can see an in depth breakdown of how usually gamers are utilizing controllers of their video games, and what sorts of controllers they’re utilizing. The information consists of gamepads, flight sticks, racing pedals, and even dance pads. Mainly, something that plugs into your PC and can be utilized to play a recreation (like a banana) however is not a mouse and keyboard is counted as a controller.
It wasn’t stunning to learn that over 70% of combating and sports activities video games have been performed with a controller (or a battle stick), whereas that quantity falls to beneath 1% for RTS video games. Solely 7-8% of gamers use a controller for first-person shooters. third particular person motion/journey video games like Elden Ring noticed a close to 50/50 break up between controller and keyboard and mouse utilization, which is stunning. Elden Ring’s mouse and keyboard assist isn’t the best.
It appears a variety of PC avid gamers favor to stay with keyboard and mouse controls, even in video games that prioritize controllers.
Valve provided examples of how utilizing this information might assist a dev enhance controller assist for his or her video games. Suppose you discover that PlayStation controller utilization falls beneath the worldwide common (24%); you would possibly need to test if the right PS button prompts are displaying in its recreation as a substitute of an Xbox controller.
Steam’s 12 months in evaluation additionally famous that gamers logged over 21% extra playtime in 2021 than 2020. The energetic daily users sit around 69 million, with a concurrent rely of 27.4 million. Steam additionally delivered over 32.9 exabytes of knowledge, which is lots of video games downloaded in 2021.
