Valve has a reputation of keeping concrete sales numbers of its Steam PC game download service to itself. However, it does sometimes open the door a little to reveal some info about what's happening with Steam. Today, Valve sent over an email press release revealing that overall, PC game sales on Steam increased by more than 100 percent in 2011. Valve says this this is the seventh year that PC game sales have more than doubled on the Steam service.
Valve also said that the amount of content that was delivered via Steam was over double the amount in 2011 compared to 2010. Valve said it served 780 petabytes of data in 2011 worldwide. In order to keep up with the massive increase in bandwidth, Valve also doubled its own server capacity in 2011 along with launching a new "content delivery architecture" that Valve says improved download rates for its users.
Valve now says that Steam has over 40 million registered users. As we previously reported, over 5 million concurrent users were online using Steam at one point earlier this week. In game trading of virtual item, which began in 2011, has resulted in over 19 million items being exchanged by Steam users.
Valve also gave an update on its Steamworks game development tools. Over 400 games now support Steamworks and 14.5 mil copies of Steamworks-based games were registered in 2011, which is a 67 percent increase from 2010.
In 2011, Valve announced plans to launch a "Big Picture" mode for Steam that would allow the client to be used on larger displays and televisions. In today's press release, Valve said the company is still "preparing" to launch the Steam Big Picture UI but did not give a launch date for that service.
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