Steam sales grow for seventh year running
2011 figures for distribution service now has over 40 million accounts and 1800 games
Valve has released some impressive figures for its Steam distribution platform for 2011, which showed the service saw more than a 100 per cent increase in year-over-year unit sales for the seventh year running.
"Steam and Steamworks continues to evolve to keep up with customer and developer demands for new services and content," said president Gabe Newell
"Support for in-game item trading prompted the exchange of over 19 million items. Support for free-to-play 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."
Steam now has more than 1,800 games and 40 million accounts, and this year broke the 5 million concurrent users mark. It also delivered twice the amount of content compared to last year, around 780 petabytes of data.
It also revealed that 14.5 million Steamworks games were registered in 2011, an increase of 67 per cent on last year.
Late last year Newell explained why piracy wasn't an issue for the distribution service, saying Steam aimed to "create greater service value than pirates."