Steam is our direct pipeline to customers. It began as a little sleeper project—a handy tool to update Counter-Strike—and morphed pretty quickly into the world’s largest online gaming platform. Steam guarantees instant access to more than 1,800 game titles and connects its 35 million active users to each other—and to us. Through Steam, fans can easily buy, play, share, modify, and build communities around Valve products as well as titles from other independent game studios. Steam is available in 237 countries and 21 different languages.
What do you think? Did you think Steam was smaller, or bigger?
Mmm i think I will use this thread later to post weekly the Steam top 10 sales. From the last week (5-11 Sept):
[ol]
[li]Dead Island[/li][li]Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine[/li][li]Deus Ex: Human Revolution[/li][li]Sid Meier’s Civilization V[/li][li]Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad[/li][li]Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3[/li][li]Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit[/li][li]Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2[/li][li]Portal 2[/li][li]Tropico 4: Steam Special Edition[/li][/ol]
I’m not surprised at the number of titles and users. What I’d like to know are the maximum and average number of sales and revenues, and of course they still don’t provide that. There sure as hell aren’t 35 million users simultaneously online for any of the titles in the Top 10…
Well, they have a graph on the Store page showing how many active players there are at any one time. You can click on it for specific numbers per game, it expands to the top 100 games, #1:Team Fortress 2 peaked at 67k, #100:Company of Heroes peaked at 500ish.
No idea how these numbers look the day of a big release, but they hit 3.9 million simultaneous users at peak yesterday.
What i would like to know is the number of people which at least 7 games or more in their account. Because i suppose a fair number of them have a Steam account for Counterstrike, or maybe they bought one or two games n retail and it happened to use Steamworks.
No idea about 7 games or more, but I find the public numbers for their Hardware survey to be pretty interesting. Based on their queries almost 20% of their installed user base still uses Windows XP.
In Oct 2010 they did a press notesaying they had 30 millions of accounts. So if now they have 35M that’s around a 20% growth in the last year in number of users.
More importantly, they defined active account as an account that owns at least one game and have logged in over the last 30 days.
One thing I like doing while sitting in the lobby between matches of the Steamworks-enabled Space Marine is clicking on random names of people waiting for the game to start and seeing:
If they have a profile set up at all on Steam.
If so, how many games they have and what they play.
It’s very enlightening, actually. Typically, people will have just a handful of games (from around 6-20 or so) and will unsurprisingly have most of their time for the last two weeks invested in the game at hand. It’s amusing to find people who are in various Steam groups and sub-communities, as well as to see what other games they play and how much information they’re willing to disclose on their Steam profiles.
Curious that Steam and XBox Live have similar numbers, in August MS announced 35M also. The big difference is the official supported countries 35 for Live 231 for Steam
Giving that information is all public by default someone could do some statistics analisys on a selected group of users and get a fairly accurate sales numbers for lots of games, suprised that no one did that already.
The active account numbers are misleading no matter how you look at it. If for no other reason then that there are people who create new accounts for each game so they can sell it.
Sure that might inflate it a small amount, but I doubt very many people do this. Also, how many of those accounts have been logged into in the last 30 days? I’d be surprised if users like this affected the numbers by more than 1%.
As i have put above, an active account is an account used in the last month. If someone would put all their games in individual per-game accounts, most of them surely wouldn’t count, as i doubt he logged in most of them in the last month.
Apart from that, i doubt there is lots of people buying and selling steam accounts.
Yes, which isn’t, really, that informative. I’m far more interested in…oh…the number of accounts which spent money on Steam itself (and not retail on a steam-enabled game!) in the last 90 days…
Remember it counts Steamworks numbers as well, and with the number of games using that…