Steam User Accounts hit 25 Million
We’ve known for some time now that Steam is growing in importance as a means of delivering PC games content, and the latest Steam figures for 2009 seem to bear that out.
Valve announced that over 25 million people have Steam accounts, with 10 million of those users also having Steam Community profiles. Overall the service saw a 25 per cent rise in users from the previous year, and the figures for concurrent users are equally impressive-peaking at 2.5 million. Average monthly player minutes now stand at more than 13 billion. Game sales on the platform saw an even bigger rise last year with a whooping 205 per cent increase, the fifth year running that Steam has seen 100% year by year sales growth.
Steam currently offers over 1,000 games from over 100 developers and publishers around the world, and some of last years biggest hits like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Dawn of War II, and Empire: Total War were all released on the service, with Empire handling all it’s DLC on Steam. Increasing numbers of publishers and developers seem attracted to the features of the service, particularly with regards to anti-piracy. Few would argue the burgeoning importance of the service on the PC landscape and Valve has big plans for the future.
“With the introduction of each new platform feature released over the years — such as the Steam Community, Steam Cloud, and Steamworks — we’ve seen corresponding growth in account numbers, concurrent player numbers and developer support for the platform,” said Gabe Newell, president of Valve.” As such, we plan to continue to expand and grow the platform to better serve the developers supporting the open platform and millions of gamers logging in each day.”
12 million for WoW, another 5 to 8 million at least for all the games where you have to sign up with Steam, even though you might have bought the game at retail (Empire Total War?) and you see an enforced 20 million who haven’t spent a penny with Steam.
You only have to look at how often you see retro and indie games in Steam’s monthly Top 10’s (the big hoopla when they released the X-Com games last year, for example.) And how these games went to the top or near the top of the charts that month on Steam shows you how little they sell of AA Titles.
I don’t look at Steam’s Top 10’s very often, and it’s obvious not many of the media do either, or they wouldn’t keep crowing on about the millions of AAA games Steam are selling, when they are hardly in their Top 10’s and and they have never given out sales figures!
The last time I did look at a Steam’s Top 10 chart, late last year, I remember Killing Floor (a game I had never heard of at the time) was No.1 and in that same chart, Borderlands, a game that had been out for about a month, was at No.8…..!
Correction: Not WoW, I meant the Half Life range of titles.
Steam’s charts reflect its promotions, so Killing Floor had probably been on a special offer.
@The Relic, I only gave that as an example. When the X-Com games went to Steam they all went to No.1 in the charts, do you think THAT many bought those games? And yet they went straight to No.1! I can give so many examples of all the digital download sites, like D2d, Impulse, etc. Watch their charts regularly, like I took the time to do, and you will see.
The problem today is that the media and gamers want to make comments and statements without doing the research required. It’s not too difficult, takes about an hour a month, specifically looking, to notice all sorts of things……! That’s why I feel I am the canary, or the kid that insists the King has no clothes!
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