Steam is more than 50% larger than PlayStation according to expert's estimate, which puts Valve's store around 200 million monthly active users

Valve hasn't released a few official Steam figures in several years, but reasonable math from a reputable source reckons the biggest store in PC gaming is hovering around 200 million monthly active users, which would make it more than 50% larger than the entire PlayStation platform. This soft figure comes from Simon Carless' GameDiscoverCo newsletter. Carless used some pretty basic math and alternate data sources to estimate Steam's growth over the past few years, and we can check it ourselves with some equally simple arithmetic based on Valve's 2025 Steam report. Carless notes that Steam's Digital Services Act notice affirms that the store had "an average of 31.1 million monthly active recipients" in the EU as of the second half of 2025 (this has been cited elsewhere as well). He used this figure as a base to compare the EU's Steam audience to the store's entire demographic, and for that he consulted Steam's public bandwidth chart, which tracks how much data is used where. Already, caveats come into play. We don't know exactly how much activity makes someone a monthly active user (MAU) under these terms – for example, playing a game versus viewing the homepage or one Steam sale link – nor will bandwidth usage perfectly correlate with user distribution. However, the math, with non-EU countries removed from Europe's stats, does roughly line up. Carless notes that this approach puts Steam at around 198 million MAU for the second half of 2025, meaning it may have crossed 200 million by now. (Image credit: Valve) Now for official stats. In 2021, Valve said Steam had 132 million MAU. This year, the company said Steam had been gaining about 3.4 million concurrent users each year ever since hitting 25 million for the first time five years ago. Again, we have to make an assumption: that Steam's concurrent users and MAU grew at exactly the same rate, which they surely did not. But they probably weren't massively detached, either, so we can approximate MAU using that rate (3.4 being 13.6% of 25) to plot five years of growth. The most generous version of this estimation gives us around 213 to 221 million MAU. We see this range because using 2021's peak of 27.4 million concurrent users as a base reduces the growth rate to 12.4%. Either way, this isn't far off Carless' result. He used a similar formula to gauge his findings and got 210 million; I just plugged in a slightly different number based on Valve's blogs. This method would also give us roughly 44 million concurrent Steam users, which is only about 9% ahead of the actual 41.2 million users that Valve reports in Steam's charts hub. We assuredly don't have the street address right, but we're probably in the right zip code, or at least the right county. This is an exercise more than anything, and I wouldn't use this kind of soft math if I were building a space shuttle. But, especially given the larger growth in PC gaming versus console gaming, it does seem fair to assume that Steam is around 50% larger than PlayStation. A recently translated report from Sony confirms PlayStation had 125 million monthly active users in March 2026, which, as a reminder, is below what Steam had five years ago. If we remove a chunk from the most conservative Steam estimate we have, we'd be right in line with the 187 million monthly users we'd need to hit that 50% mark. Instead of putting its games on PC, Sony apparently wants to escape the reputation that "PlayStation equals the living room" by selling monitors and speakers. [/url]

Jul 8, 2026 - 04:45

Steam is more than 50% larger than PlayStation according to expert's estimate, which puts Valve's store around 200 million monthly active users

Valve hasn't released a few official Steam figures in several years, but reasonable math from a reputable source reckons the biggest store in PC gaming is hovering around 200 million monthly active users, which would make it more than 50% larger than the entire PlayStation platform.

This soft figure comes from Simon Carless' GameDiscoverCo newsletter. Carless used some pretty basic math and alternate data sources to estimate Steam's growth over the past few years, and we can check it ourselves with some equally simple arithmetic based on Valve's 2025 Steam report.

Carless notes that Steam's Digital Services Act notice affirms that the store had "an average of 31.1 million monthly active recipients" in the EU as of the second half of 2025 (this has been cited elsewhere as well). He used this figure as a base to compare the EU's Steam audience to the store's entire demographic, and for that he consulted Steam's public bandwidth chart, which tracks how much data is used where.

Already, caveats come into play. We don't know exactly how much activity makes someone a monthly active user (MAU) under these terms – for example, playing a game versus viewing the homepage or one Steam sale link – nor will bandwidth usage perfectly correlate with user distribution.

However, the math, with non-EU countries removed from Europe's stats, does roughly line up. Carless notes that this approach puts Steam at around 198 million MAU for the second half of 2025, meaning it may have crossed 200 million by now.

(Image credit: Valve) Now for official stats. In 2021, Valve said Steam had 132 million MAU. This year, the company said Steam had been gaining about 3.4 million concurrent users each year ever since hitting 25 million for the first time five years ago.

Again, we have to make an assumption: that Steam's concurrent users and MAU grew at exactly the same rate, which they surely did not. But they probably weren't massively detached, either, so we can approximate MAU using that rate (3.4 being 13.6% of 25) to plot five years of growth.

The most generous version of this estimation gives us around 213 to 221 million MAU. We see this range because using 2021's peak of 27.4 million concurrent users as a base reduces the growth rate to 12.4%. Either way, this isn't far off Carless' result. He used a similar formula to gauge his findings and got 210 million; I just plugged in a slightly different number based on Valve's blogs.

This method would also give us roughly 44 million concurrent Steam users, which is only about 9% ahead of the actual 41.2 million users that Valve reports in Steam's charts hub. We assuredly don't have the street address right, but we're probably in the right zip code, or at least the right county.

This is an exercise more than anything, and I wouldn't use this kind of soft math if I were building a space shuttle. But, especially given the larger growth in PC gaming versus console gaming, it does seem fair to assume that Steam is around 50% larger than PlayStation.

A recently translated report from Sony confirms PlayStation had 125 million monthly active users in March 2026, which, as a reminder, is below what Steam had five years ago. If we remove a chunk from the most conservative Steam estimate we have, we'd be right in line with the 187 million monthly users we'd need to hit that 50% mark.

Instead of putting its games on PC, Sony apparently wants to escape the reputation that "PlayStation equals the living room" by selling monitors and speakers.

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