In this Steam news update, Valve announced their broadband delivery gaming service, Steam, has surpassed 15 million accounts. In addition, Steam’s sales growth has been tremendously successful with year-over-year sales growth of 158% through the holiday season.
Gabe Newell, president of Valve, gave an interesting quote regarding PC gaming sales. He notes that digital distribution, in this case Steam, has been hugely successful and he believes that not only will digital distribution be a future contributor to PC gaming sales, but that Steam has improved customer relations. GamerNode writer Sean gave some insights on the PC gaming sales argument, which you can read here.
Newell said, "PC gaming is thriving, and has evolved into an era of constant connectivity. That connectivity gives us the ability to have a much better relationship with customers, not just for delivering our games, but across all aspects of our business – including the design, development, and support of our games.
Features like Guest Passes, Free Weekends, Gifting, and the Steam Community have been very well received both by customers and the developers who are using Steam. We are accelerating our release of new functionality in the next year as well as finding new ways to work with our partners such as the release of Steamworks, which allows them to bring the many benefits of Steam to their packaged products."
Last month, Valve launched Steamworks, which gave a set of publishing and development tools for developers. Last year, Steam saw the launch of the Steam Community, which gave the service a social network backing – join GamerNode’s steam community!
