2009 was a huge year for Steam

[J T]

http://store.steampowered.com/news/3390/

Steam released these figures today, stating that there are now 25 million active Steam accounts. Steam is finally catching up with the consoles. There are roughly 30 million PS3s and 40 million XBox360s sold. Of course, the Wii is leaps and bounds ahead of everyone with about 67 million in sales.

Still, with all of the rumors that PC gaming has been dying, seeing this kind of growth in Steam suggests otherwise. 25 million is a lot of PC gamers and it is only one sector of the total PC market.

Unit sales on Steam also increased 205% this year over 2008. Steam has seen over a 100% increase in unit sales every year for the past 5 years.

So, if you were worried about buying digital games through Steam because you thought they might go out of business... well, it's not bloodly likely to happen anytime soon.

[DerekG52]

Awesome news! They just grifted me out of another $4 (Freedom Force and X-COM packs)!

[Dylan]

Awesome news! They just grifted me out of another $4 (Freedom Force and X-COM packs)!

I hate it when steam does this to me. I mean really, how can I afford to not purchase Psychonauts for the low-low price of $2?

[Erik_Twice]

Consider that those numbers are "active accounts", not "total accounts" so the number is higher.

I suspected that WoW+Steam made for more players than the Xbox, guess I'm not very off.

[Ramatut4001]

That's even better than I would have guessed. I'm a recent convert. In the last year or so I've bought more games than I'll ever play already. All the $2 games are too hard to pass up. The best thing about it is the flexibility. I mostly use it on my Win7 desktop. I also have an XP install on the same machine with a few games that seem to run better in XP. I also use it on my Netbook. It's amazing how many older games will run on that thing.

[fastbilly1]

I think the drop in hardware prices lead to this. Now for $500, if you dig around alittle, you can buy a pc that can run most games on the market, atleast at minimum settings. Recently I had to buy a computer for my little brothers business, they wanted a prebuilt instead of me building it for them - dont ask. Well Dell put a pc online, Quadcore 8400, 2 gigs of ddr3, 500 gig harddrive, and a Radeon HD4550 for $500, $535ish with shipping. Not the best rig but when I set it up it ran Supreme Commander very competently on one monitor - sluggish on two. It ran Half Life 2 at max everything without breaking a sweat and ran Borderlands at a solid 45 fps on medium to max everything. Sure they are not the best benchmarks (and I did not run 3dmark), but for that price that is pretty incredible.

Its funny, my old desktop - 2ghz P4, 768 megs of ddr, 40 gig harddrive, and a PCI 5200fx ran me $1300 in 2001. It ran BF1942 on medium settings at 45 fps and Half Life 2 on low settings at 20 fps, now for less than half of what I paid for I can get a computer that runs equal games so much better.

Granted the fact that hardware costs have plummeted has something to do with that. I am just waiting for someone to embrace the Netbook market. Ion or GMA950, there is money to be made there. Give me a new multiplayer ARPG, that isnt Diablo, that runs on it and itll be great love.