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Steam Reaches 13 Million Users
Gamasutra is reporting that Valve's PC game download service Steam has reached 13 million users. The company's offering has 150 movies and games on offer. "Looking further at its stats, Valve says Steam sees over 7 billion player minutes a month, and has served over 2,500 updates to its titles since its first release. Valve also says that summer will see new announcements from more publishers bringing their games to Steam ... Said Valve president Gabe Newell, 'We've approached the development of Steam the same way we treat our online games; we release something we've tested, we internalize the feedback, and then we release new features and functionality based upon the feedback received. In the past year, we've added over 100 new titles from third parties ... This growth has taught us a lot and inspired many additional features and services that we'll be releasing later this year.'"
Not covered here are their plans to create an XBox Live Gold type of service later this year - without the fee. Oh, and don't forgoet about EP2, TF2, and Portal.
Add all that to how successful and powerful Steam has become, and I'd say times are pretty damn good at Valve right now...
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
You can't see me nerr nerrr /me moons you
... that the first users are just going to be able to authorize their games.
"Enough of this wretched, whining monkey life." -- Marcus Aurelius, _Meditations_, Book 9, 37
i'm 1 of those 13 million, and i despise the service. unfotunately, valve has made it so you cant play their games online unless you use steam.
true combat elite .49 free download was just released, awesome...
truecombatelite.org
The half life collection I bought years ago came with three valid half life 1 cd keys. So I have three steam accounts. How many do you have?
I bet a lot of those are people who just bought a boxed game expecting to be able to just install and play it like normal and were surprised to have it install Steam before running.
:)
Still, it's a very impressive number, however they did it. More Steam users than Xbox 360 owners. Hell, WoW alone has 8.5 million compared to 10 million 360s - and they say PC gaming is dead
I wonder how many subscriberse WoW has, it was 7 Million in August, I'm guessing it has grown since then. Now I wonder if Blizzard is going to launch something similar to Steam, they sure have the user base to support it. And competition is badly needed, Steam has become alot better the last years, but an alternative would be great.
I like the idea with buying online, it's so damn fast and gratifying. You can just get the game without searching for cracks and stuff. I've bought Half Life 2 on a whim, it's wonderfull for casual and non gamers.
I would love to buy ordinary programs this way as well.
"...and has served over 2,500 updates to its titles since its first release" And the friends system STILL doesn't work, how hard can it be?
-Simon
25% of them must be banned accounts
10% Must be hackers
and the rest are f*****g pist the the hackers!
I have no idea if HL2 is any good, as I won't buy a game that won't run unless it checks in with the steaming mothership first. Yes, I realize that through some arcane procedure you can get it to run without connecting, but if you accidently forget to do that while online and then go offline you are SOL. I choose not to support such schemes buy not buying anything that uses steam. Kind of like not buying games that use starforce.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
Yes it's "reached" that many but I seriously doubt if a chunk of that is active users. I would really like to see data about active steam clients say within the last 6 months and then get back to me. I used it once and only once and never again as I like to physically own what I own and not lease it.
Morality, filters both ways.
Are people with accounts that had them raped from them? I personally know 11 people who had their passwords "reset" by the system. They didn't have access to their original email account any longer, hadn't made the changes to their steam accounts, and didn't have a security question so they lost their accounts. They basically just had the games they rightfully paid for stolen by Steam/Valve. In one case that was $300 worth of games that they can no longer play because Valve won't work with them to gain access to their account. They say "well, if you can fax us a copy of your driver's license and the credit card you used..." sure, can do the license. Can't exactly do the CC when the number has changed or the bank account has been closed.
I for one refuse to buy anything from Steam except for the one game I do play and that game's days are numbered. ETQW will kill off CS:S for me and it won't be coming a day too early.
There are a couple Steam alternatives out there already, though none are as robust as Steam is. I just recently used Direct2Drive to purchase STALKER, though unlike Steam they just give you a zip file to download, and you have to type in a cd key and an activation key that they send you. You also have to get the patches separately. In fact it's almost exactly like pirating a game, except instead of searching for a crack, you pay for them to give you the keys. The big problem I had with it was that it took about 20 hours to download. In comparison, I downloaded Prey off of Steam in about 2 hours. Steam has bunches of other benefits including no need to type in keys, automatic updating, almost automatic backups to cd/dvd, and the ability to access all your games anywhere with the Steam login. GameTap also has some games (or so they say!) but I haven't personally tried it yet.
Yes, I have my PlayStation and Nintendo 64 controllers plugged into my PC. But how many controllers can I plug into a USB hub and have games actually recognize them? Where is the PC-native equivalent of Bomberman, Smash Bros., Mario Party, or other four-player funfests? I want to let the kids and their guests play at once, but I want to use the SDTV a few meters from my PC rather than spending $2400 for four PCs and four monitors.
[My-favorite-console-only-game] cant be played on the PC! Well, thats because its crappy more then likely, but have you ever heard of emulators?Where do you suggest I buy a game dumper for my NES, Game Boy, Super NES, Nintendo 64, and GameCube? I can't just stick the media in an optical drive and start the game the way I can with PS1 games. And how well has PlayStation 2 emulation progressed?
Real Time Strategy games[,] MMORPG's[, and] First Person Shooters are better when played on the PC with a Mouse and Keyboard.What about arcade style sport games? What about fighting games? What about action puzzle games?
And what's the PC fan's alternative to handheld gaming systems such as Nintendo DS and PSP? A laptop?
How to sell Vista:
1) Convince Valve to release Steam for Vista ONLY!
2) Convince Blizzard to release World of Warcraft for Vista ONLY!
3) ????
4) Profit. (From selling several millions of Vista copies in few days)
Okay seriously I've just run out of pointless things to say.
I just figured this out last week in fact...
My laptop (which probably has about 1/2 the horsepower of my Athlon X2 4600 desktop) seemed to start up to "usable" state (ie not chugging along on startup apps that prevent me from effectively opening a brower, etc) a good 20-30 seconds before said desktop. I finally tracked the cause down to Steam running on my desktop but not my laptop. Once I set Steam not to run on startup, my desktop now starts up blazingly fast (at least compared to what it used to do).
I find this a bit disturbing. WTF is Steam doing!?
It also surpassed its 500 millionth crash, making it one of the buggiest programs in history.