January 29, 2010 — Valve® today announced extraordinary 2009 growth data for Steam, a leading platform for PC games and digital entertainment, with major increases in accounts, concurrent players, unit sales and more. The year also marked tremendous adoption of the Steamworks suite of publishing services in the tangible and electronic versions of many of the year's biggest releases.

During the last calendar year the platform surpassed 25 million active accounts, up 25% from the prior year. Of the 25 million accounts, over 10 million of those have profiles in the Steam Community.

In addition to the millions of new accounts created during the year, the peak number of concurrent users eclipsed the 2.5 million mark during the month of December, pushing Steam's average monthly player minutes to more than 13 billion.

Meanwhile, Steam now offers over 1,000 games from over 100 developers and publishers around the world. Unit sales for 2009 increased by more than 205%, marking the fifth straight year the platform has realized over 100% year-over-year growth in unit sales.

2009 also delivered a wave of titles supported by Steamworks, in tangible and electronic versions, including Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Dawn of War II, and Empire: Total War. Empire also used Steamworks for the delivery and management of its paid downloadable content releases.

“Steam turned five years old in March 2009,” said Gabe Newell, president of Valve. “With the introduction of each new platform feature released over the years — such as the Steam Community, Steam Cloud, and Steamworks — we've seen corresponding growth in account numbers, concurrent player numbers and developer support for the platform. As such, we plan to continue to expand and grow the platform to better serve the developers supporting the open platform and millions of gamers logging in each day.”

http://store.steampowered.com/news/3390/

That means Steam more than tripled units sold in 2009!!! WOWOW

That is really impressive but as it stands, there are still no proper alternatives to Steam so this growth will be a little stunted once others set up good shops I think.
Its a good service but I'm still pissed at the Euro/Dollar thing, screwing us Europeans as usual.

Duplicate thread:

http://www.vgchartz.com/forum/thread.php?id=99501&page=1&str=1035894253#

when you can buy several great games for only 2 euros, I don't think one should complain much. Besides, it's the publishers that make the price tags, not Valve.

pc gaming dead my ass

Its not the price of the games itself I don't approve of, its that with todays currency and exchange rates, we have to pay 35-40% more for the same product and that's just not fair imo.

that's wrong though. We have been paying the same price for years, even decades. The games still cost 50 euros, and even before the euros it still cost the same. It is irrelevant how much it costs in the US.

Think of it like this: there was a time when the US dollar was stronger than the euro. Does it mean that they should've made us europeans pay more for the games? Economy doen't work like that.

Exactly when was the dollar stronger than the euro? I don't think that that's right. Why is it irrelevant what it costs in the US? When you sell digital copies, there are no distribution, storage or freight fees and the bloated European price on Steam is artificial to the core.
There has always been a discrepancy between game prices in the US and Europe on optical, hardcase copies but we paid the same for the games on Steam up until they converted it to bleed us. I liked Steam a lot because I could download games and pay the same as people in the US but then they suddenly made the very same products artificially higher in price (a lot higher).
The dollar won't be worth more than the Euro anyway and the owners of Steam knows this.

PS: I know perfectly well how economy works but that's not my point. My point is that this pricing system on digital copies is unfair, doubly so when we paid the same amount before they made the conversion.

The numbers may be deceptive.

They said unit sales increased by 209% over 2008. I wonder how much of that were the special sales and offers they made during 2009? I wonder what actual revenue increases were for the month.