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Forums - PC Discussion - Steam is doing quite well: 100% sales increase, 40 million registered accounts

We know that Steam’s on the grow, the five million concurrent users earlier this week indicated as much. Valve have released some more info to prove that their digital distribution service is still expanding at an impressive clip.

Sales have grown by 100% for the seventh year in a row in 2011. There are now 1800 games on Steam. 40 million people have registered for accounts (though not all will be active), and 780 Petabytes of data has been distributed to customers over the course of the year. 19 million items have also been traded. Valve don’t mention how many of those were hats.

Valve’s Steamworks service for publishers and developers is also gaining plenty of traction. Steamworks provides secure DRM, cloud saving, statistical feedback and achievement support, and is now used by 400 of Steam’s 1800 games. 14.5 million Steamworks games have been shifted in the past year, 67% more than in 2010.

If Steam keeps on growing at this rate, it will have consumed the known universe by 2031. Before that happens, Valve are planning to release a Big Picture UI mode designed to fit Steam to large screens.

http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/01/06/steam-is-doing-quite-well-100-sales-increase-40-million-registered-accounts/

I actually Valve have always used active accounts in it's totals (accounts that have loged in in the past few months) and as they had a total of 35 million active accounts last year (up from 30 million the year before) 40 million active accounts sounds about right.



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I've got to admit, I never would have thought it would have reached this level of popularity.



VGhippy said:
I've got to admit, I never would have thought it would have reached this level of popularity.

It's come a long way since 2004, that's for sure.



zarx said:

I actually Valve have always used active accounts in it's totals (accounts that have loged in in the past few months) and as they had a total of 35 million active accounts last year (up from 30 million the year before) 40 million active accounts sounds about right.

 


No. Steam accounts go up to around number 40,000,000 right now. Many old accounts are completely unused. I have had around 5 accounts from my counterstrike days, only one is still in use.



 

 

That's no surprise, their deals are so good, they are practically forcing people to buy games.



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No wonder, I think they deserve it and are showing others where to go. Along with GOG, I'm set for all my gaming needs! If only Origin could take a cue from Steam, perhaps I could be arsed to play more BF3.



While the 40 million are all the total accounts, there's a huge amount of active ones. It's peaked at 5 million concurrent users, and trends at averaging over 3 million users at any given time.

If you say the average Steam user is online 6 hours a day, that's 12 million people online each day. 
If you say the average Steam user is online 4 hours a day, that's 18 million people online each day.

You could also use the fact that Steam generates 2 billion in revenue (or so. It was 1 billion in 2010 (http://pixelsmashers.com/?p=7412) and has seen a 100% increase in games sold). That's 50 dollars a person. Or well, a bit more than 50 dollars a person, as not all of the 40 million people were there at the start of 2011. Let's compare that to the Ps3.

The Ps3 sold around 125 million games in 2011 - according to VGChartz - on 46 million accounts. That's 2.7 games a person. I'm not sure how much the average Ps3 game costs, but it's bound to be more than 18 dollars.

As such, the average Steam user buys fewer games than the average Ps3 owner. That could be down to a load of things, but it does give a point in the direction that there are more inactive steam accounts than unused Playstion 3s.



Pineapple said:

While the 40 million are all the total accounts, there's a huge amount of active ones. It's peaked at 5 million concurrent users, and trends at averaging over 3 million users at any given time.

If you say the average Steam user is online 6 hours a day, that's 12 million people online each day. 
If you say the average Steam user is online 4 hours a day, that's 18 million people online each day.

You could also use the fact that Steam generates 2 billion in revenue (or so. It was 1 billion in 2010 (http://pixelsmashers.com/?p=7412) and has seen a 100% increase in games sold). That's 50 dollars a person. Or well, a bit more than 50 dollars a person, as not all of the 40 million people were there at the start of 2011. Let's compare that to the Ps3.

The Ps3 sold around 125 million games in 2011 - according to VGChartz - on 46 million accounts. That's 2.7 games a person. I'm not sure how much the average Ps3 game costs, but it's bound to be more than 18 dollars.

As such, the average Steam user buys fewer games than the average Ps3 owner. That could be down to a load of things, but it does give a point in the direction that there are more inactive steam accounts than unused Playstion 3s.

Considerring how cheap games are during the sales, you could probably buy anywhere between 1-5 games on $50. Also, some people buy games at retail that then require Steam (e.g. Skyrim). I doubt Valve would see much share from that if any. 



im_sneaky said:
zarx said:

I actually Valve have always used active accounts in it's totals (accounts that have loged in in the past few months) and as they had a total of 35 million active accounts last year (up from 30 million the year before) 40 million active accounts sounds about right.

 


No. Steam accounts go up to around number 40,000,000 right now. Many old accounts are completely unused. I have had around 5 accounts from my counterstrike days, only one is still in use.

Typically when Valve have given the total number of accounts they only give active accounts. Your 4 unused accounts wouldn't feature in the total if they keep with their counting system.



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.