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Valve has announced that they currently have over 35 million active users on Steam. Steam is Valve's (developer of Portal, Left 4 Dead, Half-Life, Counter-Strike, etc.) digital download service. It seems to me like that's a good number to drive home the fact that PC gaming isn't dead. Last year, Steam was at about 30 million users, so they've seen a great improvement in just one year. This is probably due in some part to the fact that Team Fortress 2 went free-to-play back in June. The digital download service is now available in a whopping 237 countries and 21 languages.
In order to handle the substantial growth of Steam, Valve boss Gabe Newell said that the company has had to upgrade their infrastructure and even hints at an improved Source engine. Newell said, “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."
The Valve site also mentions that, "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."
So damn cryptic! I've been hoping for a new and improved Source Engine announcement ever since Valve was supposed to hold its own press conference back at E3 2010. Hopefully we all won't have to wait much longer to see what Valve's working on, but really, when it comes to Valve, most things are usually worth the wait.
Sources: GamingBolt, Valve
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Comments
Displaying 1–11 of 11
Left4DEAD3xINxHD
come on value im been wait 4 a long time 4 left4dead3 so come on with the come on!!!!:}
Tetris_Chemist
valve is/better be the soon god of the gaming market even moreso
Alkaios
Depending on when the Valve company page was last updated, the statement on the Source engine could mean multiple things. However, I'm assuming that "it's about to get even better" is referring to Valve's plans to improve the tools developers use with it to make Source-powered games. Although a normally a poor source to cite, the Wikipedia article on the Source engine mentions that this is one of their largest current projects. Gabe has also stated numerous times that a new engine is not currently in the works.
Not_Matlock
Heh. Worth the weight.
Moltisanti
35 million active users, the nexus of PC gaming, and there still is no option to set voice chat audio output.
bigevilworldwide
Ya know thats nice and all but I sure wish the would fix the game breaking bug in the ps3 version of portal 2, as much as I love having to replay an entire section of a game because it glitches and loads you into nothing......No need to patch that right, and from researching it on the net im not the only one having the issue. And i'm sure im sure the 3 times I returned it it wasn't just a faulty disc
IntelliMoo
Valve is always improving and innovating and whatnot, but it's definitely time to bring the Source engine up to full-par with the likes of the other big ones (Unreal3, etc.). The comment "Source is considered the most flexible, comprehensive, and powerful game development environment out there" is little peculiar, because from what I've read elsewhere over the years the Source engine is actually the hardest to program for because of its pure-C requirement. But then I guess that's why it does perform really great even on older machines too.
haterhater
I do have to say that at least 20 of those accounts belong to me, so I call bogus on those numbers.
cptjames
Can anyone say EPIC ENGINE TIME!?!?!
Drakbak
Though I have no doubt the vast majority of Steam members are PC-Gamers, do note that PS3 users of Portal 2 had to register through steam in order to access online Co-op. I'm sure this helped the numbers surge, even if just a small amount.
joser1232010
First!!
Displaying 1–11 of 11