Everyone knows that Steam is the 800-pound gorilla of digital game distribution, but now there are numbers to back it up.
Valve today announced the latest growth data for Steam and says that, over the past 12 months, the platform had year-over-year new user growth of 178 percent, pushing the total number of active accounts to over 30 million. Sales growth, they say, is over 200 percent, making it the sixth straight year of realizing over 100 percent year-over-year growth in unit sales.
There are over 1,200 games now offered on Steam and, according to Valve, over 200 Steamworks games have shipped to date, including Sid Meier’s Civilization V, Just Cause 2, and R.U.S.E.
“Steam is on track to record the biggest year in its six year history,” said Valve president Gabe Newell. “The year has marked major development advances to the platform with the introduction of support for Mac titles, the Steam Wallet and in-game item buying support, and more. We believe the growth in accounts, sales, and player numbers is completely tied to this work and we plan to continue to develop the platform to offer more marketing, sales, and design tools for developers and publishers of games and digital entertainment”
In addition, the Steam Cloud, which was first introduced in Spring 2008, has surpassed the 100 million files saved milestone.
