35 Million Active Gamers on Steam; Valve hints at an Improved Source Engine

Valve has just revealed that they have over 35 million active customers on Steam. If you remember they said there were approximately 30 million last year. So it’s definitely a good bump for them in one year. Steam also hit 4 million concurrent users online this month.

Steam is now available in 237 countries and in 21 languages, and for a platform that had a really slow start in 2004, this is simply phenomenal.

Valve says,

Steam is our direct pipeline to customers. It began as a little sleeper project—a handy tool to update Counter-Strike—and morphed pretty quickly into the world’s largest online gaming platform. Steam guarantees instant access to more than 1,800 game titles and connects its 35 million active users to each other—and to us. Through Steam, fans can easily buy, play, share, modify, and build communities around Valve products as well as titles from other independent game studios. Steam is available in 237 countries and 21 different languages.

Gabe Newell mentions that to handle the growth of Steam, they have upgraded their infrastructure. For 6 million unique users logging on the platform per day, the infrastructure has to be solid, and Valve realizes the importance of this.

Newell says, “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.”

Then they hint about the improved Source engine.

In addition to Steam, there is Source, our own state-of-the-art game engine. Its sophisticated character animation, advanced AI, real-world physics, shader-based rendering, and super extensibility have helped us create some of the most popular and good-looking games on the market for computer and consoles. We don’t like to brag, but Source is considered the most flexible, comprehensive, and powerful game development environment out there. And it’s about to get even better.

It can only mean one thing – yeah you know what. But let us know what you think in the comments section below. Is Valve going to announce ‘it’ soon?

Src: Valve