| pezus said: I'm not sure if that's true though. Steam gets most of its game sales off discounted games. |
Well, looking solely at the amount of games bought isn't a good indicator for how large a platform is. For instance, I'd wager there are bought more Iphone games than Playstation 3 games, but that doesn't make it a larger market. If games are cheap, you buy more games. The same holds true for Steam. Gabe actually kept talking about this for a while back in October, where he stated that discounting a games actually lead to an increase in revenue, rather than a drop. http://www.geekwire.com/2011/experiments-video-game-economics-valves-gabe-newell
Looking at the revenue is far better for this kind of thing. I was wrong on another point, though. I thought there were only two possible conclusions, either that the 40 million weren't active accounts, or that Steam users actually buy for less money than Ps3/X360/Wii owners. However, as Scoobes pointed out, I forgot about retail PC games. I'm relatively certain none of those are tracked under Steam revenue, even if activated on Steam. (Why would they be? There's also loads of tracking issues, like no way of knowing the cost, for one), and thus, the real amount of games steam users buy is far higher than what it appears. There's also the non-Steam games to boot.
The explanation isn't (as I thought it was) that the Steam users spend less money, just that they don't spend all the money they use on the platform through Steam.
Which, considering the other data, means that the 40 million accounts is almost definitely 40 million active accounts.
