You can get very good games for dirty cheap on Steam sales.

I am still surprised that it's so successful. But very glad about it.

Anyway, what's the difference between Steam games and Steamworks games (as it says only 14.5 million Steamworks games were sold in 2011)? I thought it was the same thing.

Steamworks games have extra features like backing up your saved games, matchmaking services (provided through Steam), acheivements, in-game DLC, better community features/integration, microtransaction support (through Steam) and the possibility of cross-platform play (e.g. Portal 2 on PC and PS3 or a number of PC/Mac titles).

It's as much a developer tool as a positive for gamers as it means the devs already have a solid infrastructure to build upon rather than having to build all these features and implement them themselves. I believe it also gives them better stats on real-time player usage (including bugs) and has tools for beta testing.

Steam games on the other hand are just games available to download that don't neccessarily use Steam's in built infrastucture (e.g. Fallout 3 which uses GFWL or Dragon Age Origins which uses EAs services).

So you can buy Fallout 3 off of Steam but not do anything more than launch the game from your Steam game list?

On the other hand Skyrim then, does it count as a Steamworks game?

Pretty much. Same with Dragon Age Origins; I had to get all the DLC through EAs in-built system and achievements were on my Bioware profile rather than my Steam ID. Fallout 3 was much the same but through GFWL. Essentially, the only real advantage you have then is that your game is tied to you Steam account.

Skyrim however is a Steamworks game. It backs up saved games via cloud storage and you have Steam acheivements. Bethesda have also recently started doing Beta patches (again using Steams Beta participation system) so they can find problems with future updates before they officially release them. I think version 1.4 beta should be up soon if it's not already. 

Hows origin doing?

And yet the highest amount of people I've ever seen on any single game is just a little over 100k if not close to 200k when Skyrim launched. I'm assuming the majority just use it to chat. Steam is great, it just feels as though there is no PC community though even with 40million members. The online community of anything but AAA mainstream games die in obscurity within weeks if not days. I received Crysis 2, LotR:WitN, MoH, Fear 3 among others all on the first day of launch, some as gifts so don't judge. All dead within weeks. Worst offenders of this were Brink and Homefront, though they weren't exactly great games.

What I do like about steam though, it seems to be a great avenue for indie developers to garner popularity. It might just be more effective at doing so than XBLA.

I have to disagree.
I think Steams community is great, the forums are usually filled with lots of information required to get a game working if you run into issues and then you have the Steam groups to play with like-minded gamers.

Personally though, I play ALLOT of single player, out of the couple hundred games on Steam that I have... I've only played multi-player a couple of times, that's it. But I still use the voice chat and regular chat whilst gaming rather frequently, but I don't account for everyone.

As for games falling into obscurity... It happens constantly on the consoles. How often on a console do you have a sale which propells a 15 or 20 year game to the top of the sales charts? Almost never, everyone is always focused on the next big thing.

Take Fable: The Lost Chapters as an example as it was recently brought to Steam last year, that game was propelled to the top of the sales charts despite it being almost a decade old. This almost NEVER happens in console land.
Essentially Microsoft gets a sales boost for that game without hardly lifting a finger which gives incentives to developers to release a sequel in the firm knowledge that if they don't hit their sales target the first week that the games sales will be reinvigerated frequently over many many years, it also constantly adds new blood/noobs to a games multi-player keeping that games community alive and healthy.

Console games however usually hit it big on release but then fade into obscurity as the next big thing looms on the horizon.

If you wish to see a service though that has no community... Look no farther than Origin. It's awefull. Overpriced, consumes way to many system resources and is just a plain pain to use in my opinion.

All those games were flops tho especially on PC, I doubt you would have much better luck finding a game on PS3 for most of them as well, it's not a PC exclusive problem at all. It would be interesting to see how many people are actively playing games on PSN and XBL but nether release those numbers, other than a few games like COD and Halo and new releases I doubt there would be many games with over 100k active players on there ether tho.

You're definitely right, though with PC I just feel as though the major markets lie in the MMORPG and F2P genres. MW3 on the 360 has about 500k active players at any one time i believe, whereas MW3 on PC has about 70, which is steams 2nd to 3rd most played title.

It's not really steams fault, but more to do with PC gaming in general. There's so much variety as to what you can play that you'll be hardpressed to get incredibly large fanbases for any single game that is available on steam. It's just more apparent to me since I live in Australia. For instance from the 70k playing MW3 i doubt even 5% are from Australia. I never have problems finding local matches on console no matter how old the title is. Fat princess for example is still going strong, though It could just be insanely popular and I don't know.

Meanwhile elsewhere, you have WoW, Swtor, LoL, and Maple Story with 100s of thousands of active players outdoing console games.

I started using Steam in March of last year and to this date, I've spent in excess of $300 on games. Their sales are so awesome that you just can't resist buying games from them.