Valve has reported that the digital distribution service Steam enjoyed record numbers in 2011, enjoying over 5M users over the course of 40M accounts. 4M concurrent users play on Steam at any one time.
“Steam and Steamworks continues to evolve to keep up with customer and developer demands for new services and content,” Valve co-founder Gabe Newell stated in a press release, “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.”
Other stats released by Valve include:
* 1800 games now exist on Steam with over 400 of those on the Steamworks list.
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Year-on-year sales (from 2010-2011) increased by over 100%, for the seventh straight year.
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780 petabytes of data sent to users during 2011, twice the amount from 2010.
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Over 14.5 million Steamworks games were registered. This was up 67% from 2010.
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Over 19 million in-game items were traded, despite only two games, Portal 2 and Team Fortress 2, support this feature at this time.
Steam is currently the preeminent digital distribution service, featuring non-intrusive DRM and cloud game sharing and saving.
