Steam exceeds 30 million accounts; grows by 200% year on year

[Squilliam]

Scoobes said:

Squilliam said:

The way things seem to be going, Steam looks to be as much a gaming platform as any console. Arguably they have one of the soundest business model as they only have to keep people coming back and buying from them and they don't have to worry about things like hardware generations because their customers figure that out for themselves.

I think Gabe Newell made this point a year or two ago. It's highly profitable for them as they've effectively got the userbase and community of any of the consoles but as you say none of the hardware costs. Furthermore, they receive a fee for being the platform holders and get more profit per sale on each of their first-party software as they're also effectively the retailer and have no packaging costs. And now they're now actually expanding the hardware they're on with Mac and cross platform play via Steamworks.

Valve must be rolling in money...

Yep they must be, although their network infrastructure expenditure must be extremely high. Within a year or two they might be bigger than any one console if their active accounts keep growing at this rapid pace. They are also certainly helped by the rollout of ultra fast broadband worldwide.