Steam surpasses 30 million active users mark

It's true that traditional gaming might be having issues, but online downloadable platforms like Steam seem to do wonders. It's the way of the world and time, people don't go out to pickup games that much anymore, and instead more convieniently just download them.

Valve announces that Steam has surpassed the 30 million account mark!  Valve also revealed that it has recorded a 178 percent growth in Steam user accounts over the past 12 months. These users stay active, too, with over six million of them accessing Steam each day. To meet this increased load Steam has upgraded its infrastructure to run at 400Gps which, as the press release relates, is enough bandwidth to transmit the Oxford English Dictionary 92.6 times per second.

During the past 12 months the platform had year-over-year new user growth of 178%, pushing the total number of active accounts to over 30 million, with over 1,200 games now offered. Peak simultaneous player numbers were also up to over three million, with over six million unique gamers accessing Steam each day.

In addition to new user growth, Steam sales during the trailing 12 months increased by more than 200%, putting it on track for a sixth straight year of realizing over 100% year-over-year growth in unit sales. To meet this demand, the Steam infrastructure has been increased and now has ability to run at 400Gps, enough bandwidth to ship a digitized version of the Oxford English Dictionary 92.6 times per second.

The period also realized continued adoption of the Steamworks suite of publishing services in tangible and electronic versions of today's popular games. Included in many of the year's biggest releases -- such as Sid Meier's Civilization V, Just Cause 2, and R.U.S.E., with more to come during the holiday season -- Steamworks has now shipped in over 200 since the suite of services was released two years ago. In addition, the Steam Cloud (introduced in Spring 2008) has surpassed the 100 million files saved milestone.