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."
Just imagine the bandwidth bill...
