Valve, you wily devils. Not only do you make critically acclaimed video games, you also happened to pioneer iTunes for video games on the PC. Over the holidays, you wow-ed everyone with some ridiculous giveaways, absurd gaming deals and hit the whole Steam community with a shot of adrenaline that gave college kids the world over something to do during the Winter break.
But it doesn’t stop there. Valve recently reported its 2011 end-of-year statistics, and they’re staggering. Here’s a brief rundown of some of the highlights:
- Steam offers over 1800 games to 40 million account holders
- Year-over-year sales have doubled from 2010 to 2011, marking 100 percent growth for the 7th straight year
- 14.5 million copies of Steam registered in 2011, a 67 percent increase over 2010
- Steam doubled the amount of content it served in 2011 – over 780 Petabytes
Firstly, I didn’t even know a Petabyte was a thing. It just sounds made up. Literally, my brain can not fathom the numbers that go into that, even though I looked it up. This might just be because I’m a stupid person, though. The other shocking statistic is the fact that Steam’s sales have doubled each year for the last 7 years. I knew that they had a corner on the market, but it’s nuts to me that keeps soaring upward. And when you think about it, there’s really no other place for those sales numbers to go, considering that more content keeps coming out and there are so few legitimate competitors.
So what do you guys think of these Steam statistics? Come sing Steam’s praises if you wish.