For those who like to dive into the economic side of video games, the guy from Steam Spy has published his article about Steam global sales for the year 2016:

https://galyonk.in/steam-sales-in-2016-def2a8ab15f2#.40evucn9a

Well I bought absolutely nothing this year. The stuff I wanted wasn't sufficiently discounted.

I'm interested in seeing the sales statistics for GOG.com as well, although it's probably best left to our imaginations.

The Winter sale seemed to give a huge boost to sales of some games, Watch Dogs 2 nearly doubled it's owners in that period. (According to SteamSpy, quite a few big games received +100,000 new owners over the sale period.)

Concurrent users has broken 14 201 839 now (14 mill first time today apparently).

It's crazy to think that, despite GOG's growth over the past few years, Steam may have grown just as much if perhaps even more.

5.01 Million concurrent users were reached on the 2nd January 2012
6.04 Million concurrent users were reached on the 25th November 2012
7.19 Million concurrent users were reached on the 1st December 2013
7.67 Million concurrent users were reached on the 29th December 2013
8.02 Million concurrent users were reached on the 29th June 2014
8.50 Million concurrent users were reached on the 2nd January 2015
9.06 Million concurrent users were reached on the 15th March 2015
10 Million concurrent users were reached on the 14th June 2015
11.1 Million concurrent users were reached on the 31st October 2015
12.2 Million concurrent users were reached on the 3rd January 2016
13.1 Million concurrent users were reached on the 5th of November 2016

I still wonder why would one buy Ubisoft games from Steam. You only get double DRM instead of one by buying directly on Uplay.

For a long time you were often better off with the Steam version (for Steam users anyway) since it kept your game uptodate to the latest version while on Uplay, ignoring that you may have Uplay updates when starting it, you often had to do game updates as well, and either one, the other, or both actually required you to restart the client and/or game just to get the next patching step. So if you were behind a lot it was a pain.

They did fix their patching a year or so ago though.

That said, from what I've read, they stopped kind of 'separating' the Steam acquired games into their own Steam/Uplay style account. If you buy a Uplay game now it properly adds to your normal Uplay account it seems, so I imagine you have the choice of running it from Steam or Uplay at that point.

I might have to test that. The Double DRM stopped me playing black flag.

I find that a good indication for Steam (unit) sales is to simply look at what all the popular YouTube and Twitch streamers are playing, and what the mainstream media covers the most. That's why I'm rarely surprised at these lists.

'Buying' does not necessarily mean 'playing' though. For example Tyranny, a Top 10 seller in November, had some 15 000 active gamers (daily) at release in November, but is now down to about 1000 people ... the same as Dirt Rally interestingly enough. And there are more people playing No Man's Sky than both of these games. (according to steamcharts). These are only approximations, but is still interesting to see.

Stardew Valley surprise me. Seems most Harvest Moon fans purchased it.

That's also my feeling.
I knew it was doing 'very ok' (in here and on Steam) but seeing the [EDIT: *estimation* of] how much gross it generated is kind of puzzling.
It's been years that people are crying for a new oldschool farm sim. What is the excuse of big devs for having missed that opportunity ?

What I also know, it's that it's also been years that (more) people are asking for an oldschool, yet modern, FFTA / Ogre smthg .... what are people waiting for tapping that big opportunity ?

^^^^^ This! At least now that the flood of crap on Steam has reached such absurd levels, there are less people trying to pretend there is no problem. Even the SteamSpy founder was trying to say there is no problem (or no "indie bubble") in an article just a few months ago, in the midst of the shitstorm which was 2016. Kudos to GOG for releasing (approximately) the same number of games in 2016 that they released in 2015... instead of 5,000+ games!

interesting stats! And ya the flooding of steam with more and more games makes it more and more unappealing for me (additionally to the drm aspect)