The PC game portal posts some impressive numbers.
If you play PC games, it’s pretty much impossible to not love Steam. Between insane sales (like the recent holiday sale), built-in achievements, and a large selection of games both big and small, it’s tough for competing services like EA’s Origin to keep up. That may seem like an obvious statement, but Valve released some figures today that show just how far ahead the PC digital download portal is.
According to a press release (available to the right), Steam grew to over 40 million accounts in 2011. There are now over 1,800 games on the service; President and co-founder of Valve Gabe Newell says that a lot more free-to-play games are on the way. Valve has seen great success with the recent transition of Team Fortress 2 into a FTP model, and the company would like to see that success repeated.
Steam increased unit sales by 100% for the seventh year in a row. During the recent holiday sale, the number of simultaneous users on Steam hit a record 5 million. That would explain why some people had difficulties actually downloading their $4.99 copies of games like Mass Effect 2 and Terrarria. Oh, and for the techies out there, Steam delivered over 780 petabytes of data to customers last year. A petabyte is 1000 terabytes for you less tech-minded people out there.
With the PC rapidly becoming the preferred format of the hardest of hardcore gamers in lieu of new home consoles, time will tell if Steam surpasses these impressive numbers in 2012.
Press Release
STEAM CLOSES RECORD 2011
5 Mil Simultaneous Users, Seventh Year of 100% Unit Sales Growth
January 6, 2012 - Valve® today announced the 2011 growth data for Steam, a leading platform for PC & Mac games and digital entertainment.
During 2011 the platform grew to offer over 1,800 games to over 40 million accounts. Year-over-year unit sales increased by more than 100% for the seventh straight year, and during the 2011 Holiday Sale Steam's simultaneous user number eclipsed the 5 million player mark.
Meanwhile Steam doubled the amount of content delivered in 2011 vs. 2010, serving over 780 Petabytes of data to gamers around the world. To meet the increasing demand for games and services on the platform, the Steam infrastructure more than doubled its service capacity and a new content delivery architecture was deployed to improve user download rates.
Over 14.5 mil copies of Steamworks games were registered during the year, a 67% increase over 2010. Steamworks titles shipped during 2011 include The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Deus Ex: Human Revolution , and more. Since the suite of services was released three years ago, Steamworks has shipped in over 400 games.
"Steam and Steamworks continues to evolve to keep up with customer and developer demands for new services and content," said Gabe Newell, co-founder and president of Valve. "Support for in-game item trading prompted the exchange of over 19 million items. Support for Free to Play (FTP) games, launched in June, has spurred the launch of 18 FTP titles on Steam, with more coming in 2012. Looking forward, we are preparing for the launch of the Big Picture UI mode, which will allow gamers to experience Steam on large displays and in more rooms of the house."
For more information, please visit www.steampowered.com
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