By Alec Meer on October 30th, 2013 at 6:00 pm.
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Somehow I'm not expecting 65 million Steam Machines, however
65 million Steam accounts now, apparently. That’s a fair old slice of the approx. 7.121 billion human beings on the planet Earth – perhaps by this time next year, Valve will have reached the magic 1%. For now though, they’re celebrating a claimed 30% growth in “active accounts” over the last year, which just so happened to be the service’s 10th anniversary. What a long way it’s come from a rudimentary download service that made everyone’s life hell on Half-Life 2′s launch day.
Not a lot else to say, other than questions I can’t answer such as “how many of those accounts are regularly used; how many exist purely because someone bought a specific videogame which required the creation of a Steam account; how many are duplicates to get around bans or regional restrictions; what is the size of cow; what does ‘active’ actually mean here?” But even so, there’s absolutely no doubting Steam’s ubiquity on PC these days. I wonder what the PC landscape would be like without it – would some other service have cornered the market, or would it have been a fragmented but more free world?
I DO NOT KNOW. But I suspect Microsoft are particularly pissed off about it.
Here’s a token Gabe quote on the matter:
“The main goal of Steam has always been to increase the quality of the user’s experience by reducing the distance between content creators and their audience. As the platform grows, our job is to adapt to the changing needs of both the development and user communities. In the coming year, we plan to make perhaps our most significant collaborations with both communities through the Steam Dev Days and the Steam Machines beta.”
Following this statement, Mr Newell flew to Venus in a rocketship made of solid diamond, where he proceed to terraform the entire planet into a personal castle/battlestation made of platinum.
One Percent has a bad connotation in the US (Political and Financial) but it is nice to know that I am a member of an almost One Percent fraternity. Full Steam ahead matey.
