Steam posts seventh year of over 100% sales growth

Valve has announced 2011 growth data for its Steam service, citing a year-over-year unit sales increase of over 100% for the seventh straight year.

During 2011 the digital platform offered over 1,800 games and had over 40 million registered accounts. As previously reported, the firm's Holiday Sale also garnered over 5 million simultaneous users.

Over 14.5 million copies of Steamworks games were registered during the year, which was a 67% increase over 2010. Since the suite of services was released three years ago, Steamworks has been included in over 400 games.

"Steam and Steamworks continues to evolve to keep up with customer and developer demands for new services and content," said Gabe Newell, co-founder and president of Valve. "Support for in-game item trading prompted the exchange of over 19 million items. Support for Free to Play (FTP) games, launched in June, has spurred the launch of 18 FTP titles on Steam, with more coming in 2012.

"Looking forward, we are preparing for the launch of the Big Picture UI mode, which will allow gamers to experience Steam on large displays and in more rooms of the house."

Steam also doubled content delivered during 2011 vs. 2010, by serving over 780 Petabytes of data, and to meet the demand, doubled its service capacity and added a new content delivery architecture to improve user download rates.