True, but do you really think they'd let someone buy them?

Why would they need to let someone buy them?  Being a private company means they can do whatever they want with their profts since they don't have any shareholders to please.

They can take whatever percentage of the money they want from the company to make a rocket to the moon fueled by cash if they want.

Could be that I'm tired or that I'm not very educated when it comes to business, but who are you referring to when you say "owners"?

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.

The people who own the company.

Say I open up a lemonaid stand.

As long as that lemonaid stand is privately owned by me, I can do whatever I want with the money that comes in.

I can hire more people, I can buy better ingridents, I can buy myself a PSP game.

Gabe Newell can basically do whatever he wants with his "lemonaide stand."

Well depending on how many people own the "private" stock.

Most likely Newell owns it all though, since the Harrington split... then again it is "Valve corporation".

Either way, they could eaisly be pocketing a lot of the money, if they wanted to.

Ah, okay, gotcha. To be honest, now that I think about it, it was a rhetorical question.

For some reason, at first I thought you meant someone would move in and buy them to get a piece of the pie. But obviously I should've known you wouldn't suggest such a farfetched idea.

Steam will continue to grow, because of several reasons. But the two major ones that I think they did this year was to increasingly tie retail releases with steam, meaning people will be creating accounts just to play the games they bought in the store and their release on mac. Which is a platform that may be small, but given Apples fortunes most assuredly is seeing nice growth.

The other thing I've noticed with my friends and this is purely anecdotal, is that despite the fact that we all have had accounts since the release of half-life 2, we're now only coming back to the service to actually buy games.

I've bought more games on steam this year then all other years combined. Why? Because the pc retail sections keep on getting smaller and its hard to find a lot of the small games on the shelves. While I still by the big pc releases at retail stores all my indie and smaller releases are now bought on steam. Games such as the updated Monkey Islands, Machinariam, Aquaria etc.

The most astonishing part is that they're still getting a 200% growth 6 years after launch.

So I joined Steam to get Portal for free, I haven't touched it since then but it automatically logs on every time I turn on my computer. Am I included into that data? If I am, then that's pretty stupid.

I'm one of the new ones

Signed up to get portal for free

Friend recommended alien swarm, a cool, free, top down shooter with online co-op

Same friend later bought me L4D2 as a birthday present :)

Steam seems good from what I've seen