Steam says users averaged 11.4 petabytes of installs and updates per hour in 2025
Valve’s Steam Year in Review 2025 drew early attention for its unreleased hardware comments , including a wording change around Steam Machine, Steam Frame and Steam Controller plans. Apparently, the same report also included a separate data point on Steam’s overall traffic, which received far less attention.
According to Valve, Steam delivered about 80 exabytes of data to users in 2024. In 2025, that figure rose to 100 exabytes. Valve said that works out to an average of 274 petabytes of installs and updates per day, 11.42 petabytes per hour, and roughly 190,000 GB per minute.
All those users are downloading a lot of content. In 2024 we delivered about 80 exabytes to customers, and in 2025 that grew to 100 exabytes . It’s hard to make sense of such a huge number, but just for fun: Steam users are averaging 274 petabytes of installs and updates per day- that’s 11.42 petabytes per hour, which is about 190,000 GB of data per minute.
— Valve
The same review said Steam’s long-term user growth has continued at a steady pace. Valve said the platform crossed 25 million concurrent users five years ago, then added about 3.4 million peak concurrent users per year on average, reaching 42 million peak concurrent users.
The 100 exabytes figure covers installs and updates across the service, so it reflects not only new game downloads but also patches, preloads and ongoing live-service traffic pushed to a global user base.
In case you are wondering, other platforms only report on the number of players, revenue, but not on download stats.
Source: Steam
