Steam Surges Past 30 Million Accounts with 178% Growth Over Last Year
Valve president Gabe Newell said this about the growth:
Steam is on track to record the biggest year in its six year history. The year has marked major development advances to the platform with the introduction of support for Mac titles, the Steam Wallet and in-game item buying support, and more. We believe the growth in accounts, sales, and player numbers is completely tied to this work and we plan to continue to develop the platform to offer more marketing, sales, and design tools for developers and publishers of games and digital entertainment.
In addition, the company's Steamworks publishing services suite, which includes their anti-piracy solution (they specifically avoid terming it rights management), has now been used by over 200 games. Steamworks also enables access to their cloud-based game save system called Steam Cloud. Since starting in 2008, more than 100 million files have been saved using the system.
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PredatorPR
replyImpulse, Steam, Gamersgate = The Present and Future of PC Gaming Media. Retail is dead.
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amen to that. If I buy any game collector's edition, I wanna feel it ;D
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uh no. first of all steam is great if you are american, not so much in other parts of the world due to their staunch 1 usd = 1 real world currency stance (oh and regional locks and censorship for certain regions ).
the us pc market is relatively small compared to its console counterpart thus retail space is given to console games.
europe on the other hand especially germany (ignore the uk, even in terms of games they are americas little ugly brother) is pc country. 43% of all pc retail games sold world wide are sold in germany.
retail is always cheaper here and it always has shelve space. there is almost 0 incentive to buy digitally beyond 4 packs or preorder bonus for some digital edition.
paying with credit-cards isnt very common in euroland either which is the reason why paypal and more importantly paysafe payment was implemented recently on steam.
digital distribution is growing here but in no way retail is dead or will be in the foreseeable future.-
It's the opposite for me I live in the US and spend long periods of time in Turkey. In turkey games are very expensive and with Steam I can carry my library with me and buy games for the price I would be spending in the US.
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People who say "PC retail is dead" are ignorant of things like the inability to get broadband, or the demand for the base game on a DVD set so you don't have to preload 15 GB on your ISP that has insanely low monthly bandwidth caps. Most developers are ignorant of this because they work and live in a major metro area.
PC retail is also suffering from bad distribution (in my area, Gamestop hates PC games, Best Buy relegates them to a quarter-gondola at best, and Target only carries WoW, MW2, and The Sims).
PC retail isn't dead. It's just badly mismanaged, and not as profitable as console retail with their silly promos to jack up the margin on a game box.-
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I think it really depends on what the local store manager or retail manager wants to stock. Apparently the managers in the Boston area hate PC games, except for the Best Buy one at Milford.
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No. PC always leads the pack tech wise. With Steam, Impusle, etc, the PC is already using a business model that's years ahead of the mass market partially because there's no other choice. Consoles will always crowd out the retail space. That battle has been permanently lost. The infrastructure will steadily roll out and improve. Best to push digital distribution hard now and establish your beachhead there, especially when you are trying to become the defacto standard online platform.
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Game retail, much like movie rentals retail, is declining. It's not dead yet, but it will continue to decline. I'd backup any Steam games to a physical disc anyway.
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