Ah, too bad, but I think we've managed to establish a fairly strong conclusion anyway: Steam is a smaller online gaming service but a larger game sales service.

Wow somehow that doesn't surprise me at all

Well, there is the possibility that other than the Halo and CoD franchise, the players online drops significantly.  I was actually surprised at how far Halo has fallen.

*shrug* I find stuff like this intersting. I'd like to see how it compares to PSN at some point too... and even more interesting, I'd like to see how the totals for people playing games on XFire, Steam, Battle.net, and Gametap compare to the totals playing on Xbox Live.

I am sure the total userbase of PC far, far exceeds the Live totals.  Steam is a small subset of the PC gaming base.  Especially when Starcraft 2 comes out.  Internet might break.

Probably, but it looks like Xbox Live may have around double the active gamers on Steam, and Steam may only be part of the PC gaming base but it's still the largest (though XFire is pretty close). So I wonder how close it would be, overall, to compare the amount of people who play PC games online versus console games online.

Excluding MMOs for obvious reasons...

I like this thread. Lots of good information and a reasonable conclusion :)

If we keep this up, we could turn this into a nice little Vgchartz research project. I'm not on Live anymore (modded 360 apparently) but I'll check Steam numbers periodically.

Some PSN numbers I just looked up:

LittleBigPlanet - 11.719
Uncharted 2 - 7.720

More people are playing Little Big Planet online than Uncharted 2? That's a surprise. LBP must have very good online.