Friday, January 6th 2012
Steam Closes 2011 with 100% Sales Growth, 5 Million Simultaneous Users
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 million 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."
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 million 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."
60 Comments on Steam Closes 2011 with 100% Sales Growth, 5 Million Simultaneous Users
I can envision valve having more plans for it.
Your avatar tells me you have played TF2, so you know that Valve did a fortune with the TF2 shop so it doesn't impress me that they can pull off such money magnets strategies
But whatever, yes the Mann-co. is a money magnet but coal farmers took advantage of the Humble Indie Bundle, bought hundreds of games for almost nothing and created all those accounts just to farm coal. So that whole "achievement" was better thought-out in the summer sale rather then the Christmas sale. And the coupons aren't exactly a money saver.
Yeah I bet they were having a pretty big year even before Skyrim dropped. And those Great Gift Pile objectives was an ingenious way to surely sell a bunch of lower-end cheap games during the sale that would have sold pretty well anyway at those prices and with all those bored users on break.
(Games are a form of excaping reality and cheaper and safer than drugs ;) )
Valve certainly knows how to entice its customers to buy stuff... especially this holiday season.