that Chinese gamers would no longer be able to use Steam's global service as its international domain name has been designated as "illegal" due to "illicit activities" which were unspecified. The block has effectively locked all Chinese users out of games they had purchased through Steam's international service, and that they would only be able to go through Steam's China-specific application. Reception and impact Users Valve reported that there were 125 million active accounts on Steam by the end of 2015. By August 2017, the company reported that there were 27 million new active accounts since January 2016, bringing the total number of active users to at least 150 million. Most accounts were from North America and Western Europe, with there being a significant growth in accounts from Asian countries around 2017, spurred by their work to help localize the client and make additional currency options available to purchasers. In 2017, Tim Colwill opinionated for Polygon that some users show a so called "Good Guy Valve" attitude towards the company. Valve also considers the concurrent user count a key indicator of the success of the platform, reflecting how many accounts were logged into Steam at the same time. By August 2017, Valve reported that they saw a peak of 14 million concurrent players, up from 8.4 million in 2015, with 33 million concurrent players each day and 67 million each month. By January 2018, the peak online count had reached 18.5 million, with over 47 million daily active users. During the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, in which a large proportion of the world's population were encouraged or forced to stay at home, Steam saw a concurrent player count of over 23 million in March, along with several games seeing similar record-breaking concurrent counts. The figure was broken again in January 2021 with over 25 million users shortly after the release of the highly anticipated game Cyberpunk 2077, itself the first single-player game on the service to have over a million concurrent players. Researchers have used crowdsourced feedback from Steam reviews for educational games. Sales and distribution Steam has grown from seven games in 2004 to over 30,000 by 2019, with additional non-gaming products, such as creation software, DLC, and videos, numbering over 20,000. The growth of games on Steam is attributed to changes in Valve's curation approach, which allows publishers to add games without having Valve's direct involvement enabled by