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: gabe newell
Valve president Gabe Newell took the time to talk out about the “threat” of piracy in the PC Market recently, and had some interesting things to add on that matter.
“When you list the things that we worry about in our business, piracy is not one of them,” he told the audience when piracy was brought up.
His statements differ from that of many large publishers, who for the most part feel piracy is killing acceptable profit margins in the PC gaming business. Newell feels that Valve’s Steam platform is mostly protected from piracy.
“We’ve got great facilities that make it very hard for people to pirate. And more importantly, the service value of having an ongoing relationship with us is high enough that it causes people to not be very interested in piracy.
“It’s a dangerous thing to pirate one of our games because later on, when we catch you, you lose all your games, or you can’t play multiplayer.”
Before Newell came up, Valve’s Jason Holtman was asked how he felt about the rampant piracy in emerging markets such as Russia and China. He felt those fears were misplaced and the problems could be fixed rather easily.
He added that Valve solved the problem of international piracy by releasing their games simultaneously worldwide, unlike most publishers which release the games up to six months later in markets outside of Western Europe and the US.
“We know that that’s the major place where this rampant piracy myth comes from,” Holtman said speaking of Russia. “Rampant piracy is just unserved customers.”
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