Steam is celebrating its 10th birthday this year. And what a celebration it is. The company has reached new milestones this year with new innovative hardware products. More recently though, Valve’s digital games platform has hit 65-million active users.
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As reported by The Verge, Steam has managed to increase the amount of players by 30% since last year.
According to the stats, the most popular game is the free-to-play Dota 2, with more than 500 000 daily peak concurrent players. This is followed by Team Fortress 2. While Steam does distribute third-party game titles, the two most popular titles are Valve’s.
Another big feature of Steam’s success is the focus on being open as it supports Windows, Mac and Linux OS. With the Greenlight feature, indie developers are encouraged to distribute their titles in front of a large audience. In response to this success, Steam is planning its first developer conference next year.
Valve co-founder Gabe Newell said earlier this year that while the market for PCs has been declining over the last few years, the market for games has been growing considerably. Steam is, as we can see, a great contributor to the popularity of PC gaming.
Steam is boldly venturing into the hardware market while the Steam OS was announced earlier this year together with the innovative Steam Controller and, of course, the mysterious Steam Box gaming machine.
The so-called Steam Box is said to be a melange between a mini PC and a console. This living room entertainment device is planned for released around the same time the two biggest next-gen consoles are launched. Xbox has about 48-million accounts while Sony Playstation has a massive 110-million.
Steam is a big supporter of the Linux operating system and believes it to be the “future of gaming“. Though, there are about around 198 games available for Linux via Steam, the OS makes up for about 1% of the PC with Windows most likely leading the majority of the market.
