Steam, Valve’s juggernaut of a gaming platform, experienced a huge amount of growth in 2011. The platform’s games list grew to over 1,800 titles, while their user base increased to over 40 million accounts—and at one point over 5 million players were signed into the Steam service at the same time. Over 780 Petabytes of data was served up worldwide (that’s 780,000,000,000,000,000 in case you were wondering).
During the same period, Steam’s infrastructure more than doubled its service capacity and a new content delivery architecture was deployed to improve user download rates.
Steamworks saw a 67% implementation increase over 2010, used in games including Deus Ex: Human Revolution, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, and Colon: the Punctuating. Estimates place Steamworks in over 400 currently available 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.”
When it comes to PC gaming, Steam is hands-down the number one distribution system. Others have tried (or are trying) to duplicate its success, but so far none has come close to matching the sheer volume of content or level of quality service. Their annual summer and holiday sales have only helped to boost the service’s popularity.
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