Steam has over 30 million accounts

By Robert Purchese Published 18 October, 2010

Newell praises the big Mac effect.

There are more than 30 million people that have Steam accounts, Valve has announced.

That figure headlines a list of impressive statistics. In the last 12 months, the number of users has grown 178 per cent. The new peak concurrent user record is over three million, and six million unique users use Steam every day.

Steam sales during the 12 months were up 200 per cent, and the service's infrastructure can now run at 400GB per second - enough, apparently, to transfer the English dictionary 92 times a second. As if anyone wants to read that.

"Steam is on track to record the biggest year in its six year history," commented Valve's number one, Gabe Newell. Big new additions were support of Mac games, the Steam Wallet and in-game item sales.

Valve also touted the Steamworks set of developer tools, which are present in lots of today's biggest PC releases: Civilization V and R.U.S.E. among them.

Picture of Robert.

About Robert Purchese

Bertie is Eurogamer's Senior Staff Writer. When he's not hunting down news stories he's often found playing with his kids or gabbling about fantasy games and strange online worlds. @Clert on Twitter.

Read more articles from Robert by visiting the Robert Purchese archive page.

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Comments (27) Latest comment 2 years ago

Comments for this article are now closed, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • CaptainQuint #1 2 years ago

    "Newell praises Big Macs."

    FIXED.

  • TheWretched #2 2 years ago

    "Newell is made out of BigMacs"

    Fixed^2

  • J0rdan_KZ #3 2 years ago

    Good on you Valve. I managed to pick up the entire first season of the Monkey Island episodes for £3.50 last week. Impulse buying ftw.

  • oceanmotion #4 2 years ago

    I've had three accounts though, two of which I don't use. Sure loads of others have done the same.

    Wuv Steam anyway. Bring on the holiday wallet destroyers.

  • spliffhead #5 2 years ago

    So where the hell is more Half Life!

  • Eraysor #6 2 years ago

    First of all, well done to Valve for making in my opinion probably the best thing to happen to gaming in the last decade.

    Secondly, get back to making Half-Life 3 you lazy bastards!

  • UncleLou #7 2 years ago

    and the service's infrastructure can now run at 400GB per second

    I wish Sony would take a good look at that. PSN download speeds seem to be 1/5th of Steam's, on average.

  • Luk333 #8 2 years ago

    I hope that at some point they'll also show us how many people are playing at a given moment, because if someone is online it doesn't necessarily mean that he's playing; I have Steam running in background all the time.

  • abdo #9 2 years ago

    @UncleLou

    I usually get up to 1 MB/s when downloading stuff from the PS Store. On Steam I peak at 1.3 MB/s. Not much of a difference, maybe there's a problem with your network config.

  • TOOTR #10 2 years ago

    And 29.99 million of those users have downloaded games in Steam sales which they will never find time to play ever!

    Am I right?

    /looks around

    Surely not just me?

  • Buztafen #11 2 years ago

    Err....Newell!...Episode 3?

    /taps watch

  • chessboxer #12 2 years ago

    @Luk333

    Do you mean something like this:

    http://store.steampowered.com/stats/

  • Skurmedel #13 2 years ago

    Lewd jokes about Gabe's girth... how imaginative. Like joking about how old the Queen is.

  • Arcadiian #14 2 years ago

    The service isn't bad at all, but I use it because I was forced to. Not out of choice.

  • NimbusTLD #15 2 years ago

    Wow, thanks chessboxer! I never knew they also tracked single player games being played :)

  • Retroid #16 2 years ago

    Steam is pretty much how digital distribution should be. Very happy with the service.

  • Bagpuss #17 2 years ago

    I'd like to know how much steam boosts the sales of Hard Drives for storage purchases every year...

    I dread Steam Sales...so much to buy, so little HD space left every year..when games reaguarly use over 10GB each, doesnt take long to run out..

    Edited by Bagpuss at 18/10/10 @ 17:54

  • sneetch #18 2 years ago

    @Bagpuss

    External USB harddrives are the way to go, have a cheap 500GB one that I back up "unused" Steam games to now (beats the hell out of redownloading them next time the whim takes me).

  • bad09 #19 2 years ago

    "Steam is pretty much how digital distribution should be. Very happy with the service."

    I agree with Retroid on this except for one very big problem which reared it's ugly head recently for me, Steam's offline mode. Only twice in the year and a bit of using Steam have I needed it but 50% of that time it failed me (as it has many others). Being robbed of my games for days merely because my connection (and offline mode) fails doesn't bode well in this consumers confidence. While the "cheaper on disc" argument doesn't bother me as the instant access to buying is worth it on Steam (no PC in my area) disc buying has increased in appeal again after those looooong 2 days denied the INSTALLED AND ACTIVATED games I paid MY money for.

  • layleeloo #20 2 years ago

    Ah yes, but how many actually buy games from it? I have an account, but think I've bought one game from it since it started. Nothing against it - but Im a physical media man who likes to look at and take pride in a collection.

  • infernox1 #21 2 years ago

    i dont think its down to mac users. me and many of my friends just started using steam this year through the high profile steam sales we kept hearing about. we are all pc users btw.

  • Cosquae #22 2 years ago

    No, it can't be true...

    ...pc gaming is dying you see...

    /coat

  • Zaiz #23 2 years ago

    @Abdo

    I've hit 2.6 mbp/s. Not at college, though...>.>

  • deadsoldiers #24 2 years ago

    "Newell eats 30 million bic mags each day."

    Fixed^3

  • FooAtari #25 2 years ago

    This was written on the PCGamer news article for this;

    "For reference, Xbox Live has 25 million accounts total. Even if Steam accounted for the entirety of PC gaming, which it doesn’t by any means, this would give you some idea of how not dead it is."

  • Luk333 #26 2 years ago

    @chessboxer

    Yes, I know about that, but it still doesn't show the total number of persons playing games right at that moment. You could manually add the players from the top 100 games, but that wouldn't be the whole picture and it would be really tedious.

  • headrush #27 2 years ago

    Counter Strike still rocks.