EL33TONLINE: News - Steam: 15 million and counting

Steam: 15 million and counting

Posted by Peter on February 08, 2008 at 12:19 AM

You will notice this is a console gaming blog and news site (hopefully that much is obvious). Well, it so happens that we were all big PC gamers in the day. Before the advent of the PlayStation, console gaming in sunny South Africa was limited to buying pirate consoles called Family Computer and to get a new game you visited your local Chinese “importer” down some alley in central Durban. These carts typically came with moon-text (since we had no idea what that stuff really was) or hilariously translated Engrish.

So, if you gamed here before ‘96 you were a PC gamer or a true-blue pirate. Most likely you were both.

That all changed for me - consoles are my platform of choice these days. But, I can’t ignore the fact that Steam has these wonderful little puzzle games that just about any PC can play. The latest is Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords, and it’s a time-blackhole. At only $20 it’s a very, very good deal. My previous affair was with Geometry Wars, available for the giveaway price of $4.

Anyhow, Valve has just announced that Steam has reached a total of 15 million users, and that their revenue from the digital download service grew by 158% over the Christmas shopping season last year compared with the previous year.

That’s impressive. I mean, it’s bigger than World of Warcraft and Xbox Live. I thought PC gaming was supposed to be dead?

Tags: pc, steam, valve

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