Very true, but this is indeed only one of many platforms, on top of retail.

and on top of MMO players. 11.5 millions for WoW alone.

Go Steam.

I mean hell... if I'm buying "the rights" to install a game, rather then the game itself, to hell with CDs.

It's bullshit that I buy the rights to play a game yet if the CD breaks I have to buy "another right" even though I still have the first license.

Better to have it all on a giant download site I can download at my leisure from... and if worried can have copies that way.

This is an interesting site. The site owner has basically written a crawler which trawls through the public Steam community pages and tallies the number of players for those titles that have Steam achievements.

Some sample numbers-

Team Fortress 2: 1,740,658
Half-Life 2: Episode Two: 1,255,624
Portal: 1,247,849
Left 4 Dead: 1,216,644
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2: 1,023,973
Left 4 Dead 2: 673,940

Bear in mind that these are only from public community pages, which are less than 40% of the total Steam user base. An IW community fella recently stated that 'millions' of PC owners were playing MW2, so it looks likely that you can at least double the numbers there to arrive at overall sales figures. It obviously doesn't give Steam sales figures as most of these games are also sold at retail, but the full list of the games covered, does show a number of games which are digital download only. Some pretty healthy figures in there.

Hmm, no data on Dragon Age, or Borderlands. Those are two games from 2009 that would be interesting to see. =/

I think the growth of indie games last year compare to 2008 also helped this overall growth a lot. The steam holiday's also offered some sick deals which almost impossible to pass.

Yep, it can only collate those games that have Steam achievements.

As an incredibly rough estimate- going by the concurrent player stats, Torchlight peaked at around 6000 or so and has a figure of around 170,000 users in the list. I think Dragon Age peaked at around 17500 just after release, so you could be looking at maybe 500,000+. That would roughly tally with the L4D2 figures which had a concurrent user peak of around 22,000 or so and has a a figure of 680,000 in the list.

Interestingly, Mass Effect 2 currently has over 15,000 concurrent users. If (and I freely admit it's a big if), you can extrapolate in a similar manner, that would indicate that it too has sold over 400,000 on Steam. And that's just on one digital platform, and doesn't include retail sales. Extremely impressive, and there's a possibility that it has outsold the 360 version.

Are there stats about how much of this growth in sales come from 1-5 dollar deals and full price?

wow that'sa damn interesting!! It's funny considering that most people here in VGChartz think that MW2 only sold like 500k on PC. Infact, the biggest guesstimation i've seen on the site was only 750k for the PC version.