Steam receives hundreds of thousands of refund requests a day

Data from Valve's Steam Charts page reveals interesting details about the storefront's daily and weekly metrics.

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It's been well known that Steam is the most popular PC gaming storefront/platform on the market, but some of the info revealed on Valve's various stats pages is still pretty eye-opening. Among the metrics included in Steam's public database are figures for refund requests, best-selling games by gross revenue, and worldwide data traffic.

According to the Steam Charts section, Valve receives hundreds of thousands of refund requests from consumers on a daily basis. A quick scan of provided column graph shows Valve received 542,388 support requests on December 27. Of this total number, 91% of the total or 494,495 of the requests were Steam gamers seeking refunds for games.

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Valve doesn't confirm how many refunds it actually granted, though the company is known for being quite understanding in giving players their money back for products they didn't enjoy.

Elsewhere in the database, Valve quantifies the incredible amount of data traffic that Steam receives on a daily basis.

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The United States leads in data traffic, beating out all other worldwide countries (even China, but only slightly) with 365.8 petabytes (PB) of data traffic in the last 24-hour period. The U.S. comprises 22.9% of total global Steam traffic and China follows closely with 21.3%. Valve notes that the average download rate for U.S. data traffic is 99.4 Mbps.

On a 48-hour basis, Steam's total used download bandwidth was at 20.7 Tbps, with North America utilizing 6.3 Tbps of download bandwidth.