According to recent figures from Valve, active Steam accounts grew by 25 percent, year-on-year, to over 25 million.
Monthly “player minutes” has reached 13 billion, an all-time high, says the company.
Concurrent users hit an all-time high as well in December, at over 2.5 million.
“Steam turned five years old in March 2009,” added 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.”
Result for: account numbers
After last month’s “three strikes and you’re off the Internet” announcement in the UK was made official, it seems the large ISP Virgin Media will be the first to implement the plan.
Although record labels have been pushing for a plan like this for years, it is not even known yet whether the actual measures are legal. The government is expected to have a meeting on that very subject sometime next month. Despite this fact, BPI and Virgin say they will enact a pilot program using the infamous “three strikes and you’re off the Internet”.
A spokesman for Virgin Media said: “We have been in discussions with rights holders organisations about how a voluntary scheme could work. We are taking this problem seriously and would favour a sensible voluntary solution…the BPI has teams of technicians to trace illegal music downloading to individual accounts. It will hand these account numbers over to Virgin Media, which will match them to names and addresses.”
BPI plans to send warning letters for first time offenders, a temporary suspension of Internet services for the “second strike” and finally a full disconnection for the final strike.
