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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.'"
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 like it. When I reformat my computer, it's hit-or-miss which games I reinstall. Basically, whatever CDs I have handy, I might toss in. Except for my Steam games. I install the Steam client, spend 5 minutes getting all the downloads started, and a few hours later there are my games. I've never had a problem with it.
I've never understood the whole mothership fear thing. All it does is check for updates, it's not like you can remove a purchased game from your account (you can delete local content, ie. the stuff on your computer, but the server side account record still shows that you are entitled to that game) so it's not authenticating your ownership or anything (that's why even 3rd party mod stuff triggers it; it checks for update entries for 'mod z' sees none and continues on.) What with the fear? Is it a fear of something hidden? A fear of loss of control? Or is it some fear/anger I don't understand, like dial-up?
Demented But Determined.