Gamernode: News - Gabe Newell says PC gaming is thriving

Gabe Newell says PC gaming is thriving

Category: PC, Posted: 02/07/2008 at 03:47PM CST by Billy Wang, Previews Editor

steamlogo 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!

Posted by jambo on 02/07/2008 at 04:02PM

Good to hear that sales are up, up, up! Would be nice to see some official sales figures so we can put PC sales into perspective with console sales.

Posted by klaymore on 02/07/2008 at 04:33PM

Back in my day steam was new.

Posted by jambo on 02/07/2008 at 05:32PM

Back in my day we used 14.4kbps modems to download the Doom Shareware demo!

Posted by P-Thunder. on 02/07/2008 at 06:32PM

Whats a 'broadband' was the question in my day!

Posted by Eddie R Inzauto on 02/07/2008 at 09:44PM

"What's a computer?" was the question in MY day.

Posted by KindGalaxy on 02/08/2008 at 01:52AM

I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.

Posted by Eddie R Inzauto on 02/08/2008 at 07:29AM

^^ Winner ^^

Posted by AydenV2 on 02/09/2008 at 10:26AM

Gabe Newell obviously doesn't know what he is talking about. PC Games have only accounted for 17% of the ENTIRE Video game industry. This is down a huge amount from previous years. PC Gaming is slowly but steadily dying because of piracy, PC requirements and lack of any media coverage. To come off and say PC games are "thriving" is an utter lie, unfortunately. Steam might be doing well, but steam /= industry.

Source: www.joystiq.com/2008/01/28/ pc-game-sales-only-14-of-industry-in-2007

Posted by AydenV2 on 02/09/2008 at 10:32AM

CORRECTION: the sales of PC games are actually at 14%... even worse.