Does Steam have more costumers than PS3 and X360?

[Killergran]

naznatips said:

This doesn't compeltely answer your questions, but:

In Feb 2009, Valve reported more than 20 million active steam subscribers. I'd assume this means they log on at least once a week, as I believe that's the same qualification Sony and MS use when they report active subscribers. Source: http://g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/693342/Live-Blog-DICE-2009-Keynote---Gabe-Newell-Valve-Software.html

Xbox Live just reported only 20 million active active subscribers last week, which is all accounts including their gold, silver, windows live, and even forum accounts (I had an xbox live account for a full year before I got a 360). Source: http://www.kotaku.com.au/2010/01/xbox-360-39-million-consoles-sold-only-half-are-on-xbox-live/

In that same report, Microsoft bragged that they reached a record of 2.2 million users online simultaneously. Steam however far exedes that number on a daily basis, and its peak number of congruent members is almost 2.5 million daily. What their peak is I have no idea, but I would assume it's much much larger. Source: http://store.steampowered.com/stats/

As far as revenue, Steam doesn't release such information, but I do know World of Goo, despite being available in many locations, made the mast majority of its money on Steam. Source: http://www.offworld.com/2009/03/indie-games-summit-ron-carmel.html

 

I don't think there's any question that Steam is a signifficantly larger online service than Xbox Live and PSN. The only remaining question is if it's larger than them combined... but that seems unlikely.

http://en.w

ikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_%28content_delivery%29F

I'd assume that an active subscriber is a person that has a 'subscription', that is, owns a game on steam. Much like Daggy says. And I'm not all that impressed with Steams peak numbers either. Most people (my assumption) that installs steam doesn't untick the 'start steam when windows start' box in the settings, so the number of people active at the same time would be incomparable to the xbox's numbers, because people don't log in to Live unless they are playing or planning to play games (again, this is my assumption).

I'd agree with Steam being bigger than PSN, and I definitely think it brings in way more revenue than either PSN or Live, probably way more than both of those together (apart from the Live subsciption fee anyway). But I don't think, as the OP asked, that it has more customers than the PS3 or the Xbox 360.