Steam has been a digital distribution giant ever since Valve decided to take the program in that direction back in 2005. Despite the emergence of competition this year from EA’s Origin, Valve has reported that 2011 was yet another year of immense growth for the platform with an over 100 percent increase in year-to-year sales.
This is the seventh straight year of such growth for Steam, with the platform growing to a library of over 1,800 games and 40 million accounts. During its 2011 Holiday Sale, Steam also passed the 5-million simultaneous player mark.
Steam also doubled both its content quantity delivered and server capacity to accompany the still-growing demand and popularity in 2011. The amount of total data sent to users through the platform over the past year totaled over 780 petabytes, which equals over 780,000 terabytes.
“Steam and Steamworks continues to evolve to keep up with customer and developer demands for new services and content,” said Gabe Newell, co-founder and president of Valve about the platform’s success. “Support for in-game item trading prompted the exchange of over 19 million items.
“Support for Free to Play (FTP) games, launched in June, has spurred the launch of 18 FTP titles on Steam, with more coming in 2012. Looking forward, we are preparing for the launch of the Big Picture UI mode, which will allow gamers to experience Steam on large displays and in more rooms of the house.”
