Steam is now synonymous with PC gaming, and for good reason: Valve’s storefront/gaming service/client is the de facto standard for most PC game releases, with there being few holdouts (Blizzard and EA being the most notable, and even EA releases some of its stuff on Steam). Gamers have taken to the service in droves. Today we found out just how big those droves are.
Active Steam users number north of 65 million- to put this in perspective, this is a lot more than the active users on Xbox Live, or PSN, and definitely a lot more than the active users on Nintendo Network.
Although Valve declined to provide us with any metric for how ‘active users’ are measured, they did however give us another interesting stat- the number of concurrent players on Steam, which is more than 6 million at its maximum. That is a staggering number (again, for perspective, more people are logged into Steam playing games at any given time than there have been PS Vitas or Wii Us sold), so it’s another feather in Steam’s cap.
In the coming year, as Steam makes its push into the living room via the Steam Machine and Steam OS, it should get even bigger. That’ll be interesting to see.
