While Steam is available in the majority of locations around the world, many users were surprised after finding that a recent map of logged-in users indicated that somebody had accessed Valve's storefront from Bouvet Island. Given that Bouvet Island is an uninhabited volcanic island located between South Africa and Antarctica, the map raised eyebrows and speculation among Steam users.
Following its 2003 launch, Steam acted as a launcher for games like Half-Life and Counter-Strike. After emerging as a storefront for PC games, the popularity of Steam took off in the years that followed. Steam's importance as the most popular PC gaming storefront is due to its vast catalog of available titles from developers and publishers of all sizes, along with easy access to free demos for gamers to try out. Steam's success as a storefront and gaming platform has since spawned competition from other apps like the Epic Games Store.
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Steam Was Recently Accessed From the Remote Bouvet Island
Though Steam is largely popular in countries like China, the US, and parts of Europe, some keen-eyed users recently spotted a potential login from a remote location. On the Steam subreddit, a user named omcjupier asked if someone was accessing Valve's services from Bouvet Island, a remote volcanic location in the southern Atlantic Ocean. Bouvet Island has been a dependent territory of Norway since 1930, and is considered uninhabited. However, summer expeditions to Bouvet Island have been conducted by Norway since the 1970s, and research stations have since been used for meteorological purposes by small crews. Bouvet Island is known as the main setting for the 2004 cult-classic film Alien vs. Predator.
The map that omcjupier cited was taken from a separate Reddit thread made two months prior, which compared Steam user download activity in 2013 and 2025. Download activity was dominated by countries like China, the US, and Russia, where users in each country collectively downloaded hundreds of petabytes of data from Steam's servers. In response to omcjupier's question, some Reddit users guessed that Starlink, a satellite-based ISP owned and operated by SpaceX, could have feasibly been used to access Steam from either the island itself or from a nearby ship out in the southern Atlantic waters.
Although consumers have alternatively used a virtual private network (VPN) to conceal their actual location and access websites unavailable in their country, it remains unclear why Steam's maps stated that a user logged in from Bouvet Island. Only time will tell what other bizarre locations will access Valve's storefront down the road.
