According to Valve the fastest growing country for Steam by far in recent years has been China (also counted in that graph, including the ones using the Chinese client), which now represents around a third of the current Steam userbase.
Let's see if the Steam data backs this claim and let's see the growth in and outside China.
Steam CCU (those actually using it, not having it in the background minimized in icon tray) progresion:
So we see that the CCU peak increased from over 7M late 2021 to over 12-13M late 2025. Let's make a deep dive to go into detail.
Current data, late 2025:
The Steam CCUs now vary depending on the hour of the day between around 5.5M and 10M in working days, and around 7.5M and 12.5M during weekends.
Aprox the same period from 2021 (older data gets normalized, only shows the daily peaks):
Back in aprox the same period of 2021 they had 5.6-6.1M during working days and 7.1-7.8M during weekends, we don't know in which specific timezones.
But we see that the bottom portion of the days where they have the lowest CCUs is mostly the same than 4 years ago, but instead the daily peaks are noticiably higher. This lead us to think that instead of an even proportional in all regions, a general growth worldwide, the growth has been instead focused specially in a specific area, the main region where now players are playing during these peak hours. Let's see exactly when these daily peaks are.
Closer look to identify peak hours in late 2025:
Meaning, the Steam CCU growth in these 4 years has been in mostly in certain peak hours. If we go to check which are the peak hours for steam, they are 13:00-16:00 UTC.
Here we can see each day is a CCU mountain having each day some distinctive portions, let's see how they correlate to each region:
- The highest portion of the peak, that short tallest peak at the start of the mountain that are the Chinese peak hours (10:00-16:00 UTC aprox)
- Then it continues a bit lower but still high during a longer period of time the EU top hours , maybe overlapping them a bit (16:00-00:00 UTC aprox)
- Then American peak hours (0:00-7:00 CET aprox.) are that small, almost flat mini mountain that there is in the valley between the big mountain of the day and the next one
So that growth in the daily Steam CCU peak comes mainly from the China meridians. So pretty likely from China but maybe also Russia, India, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines or Korea. Let's double check that with the language usage of Steam's monthly hardware survey:
Let's see the language usage in Steam:
- Simplified Chinese 24.01%
- Russian 9.66%
- Japanese 2.58%
- Korean 1.41%
- Traditional Chinese 1.41%
- Thai 0.83%
- Vietnamese 0.18%
- Indonesian 0.13%
Over a quarter of the Steam players have Chinese as main language in Steam. Over 40% when adding languages of that region. And this isn't counting players from there who have Steam in English, as may be the Indians because I don't see any Indian language in the Steam list.
