With the dawn of 2020 upon us, Valve has released a recap of "major updates and new features" added to Steam throughout 2019. It was a big year: according to a blog post on Year in Review, more new games were "successful" on Steam in 2019 than in 2018, and median revenue for new games also increased. The number of monthly active users increased to about 95 million, and despite the occasional perception that Steam sales are not as big as they used to be, "2019 ended strong with the most successful sale ever."

Many of the submissions were about the launch of Steam Labs and the "experiments" that emerged from it, such as Micro Trailers, Interactive Recommender, and Community Recommendations, as well as better sorting options, custom "shelves" and improved game pages, as well as the Big Library Update, a major overhaul of the look and feel that also added quite a few new features, which we have covered previously.

There is also some interesting trivia. There were about 21 billion game hours played on Steam last year, 4.3 million items uploaded to the Steam Workshop (some "fake items" were used to hijack accounts, forcing the introduction of a new authentication step), 44 review bombs were addressed, and the last In the last two months of the year, 3.7 million people used Remote Play and 2.3 million people used Remote Play Together.

This is a thorough overview of Steam's evolution over the year, and worth diving into if you're interested in the nuts and bolts of how it all works. But perhaps more interesting is the perspective on Valve's plans for Steam in 2020:

While the Steam sale events may be fun, what I'm really looking forward to is the "Deep Data Dive." Something along the lines of "official" SteamSpy (admittedly, this doesn't really sound like it, but I'm living in hope) would be very useful, although it may relate more to my specific interests than to gamers in general.

Valve also plans to improve Steam TV, chat, libraries, the Steam Store, and other features, as well as "projects we're not ready to talk about yet." All of these details will be revealed later this year.