Steam Shows PC Gaming Isn't Dead

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Demon_Skeith

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Valve has announced some incredible 2011 growth data for their digital distribution service Steam that proves, once again, that PC gaming isn't dead. In 2011 Steam offered over 1,800 games to over 40 million accounts and their year-over-year sales increased by more than 100% for the seventh straight year. During their 2011 Holiday Sale, over 5 million simultaneous players were on Steam enjoying their 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."

Newell continued, "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."

To give you a figure of how much content Steam delivered in 2011, they served over 780 Petabytes of data to gamers around the world, which roughly equals about 780,000,000 GB.

Steam only started seeing serious competition in 2011 with EA's Origin server, GOG, OnLive, Direct2Drive, and GameStop so this year it will be interesting to see if Steam will come out on top once again, or if everyone else hopping on the bandwagon will have an impact in their sales.

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dead in stores, alive and strong online.
 
PC gaming is not really dead in stores in Canada since most computer, and electronic stores still have a huge collection of newer, and older PC games section in the Computer section whenever I visit a store like Best Buy.

Canada has bandwidth caps where you can only use 60GB or less of Traffic a month when you subscribe to a 40 dollar a month internet service before being charged 1 dollar or more per GB.

Almost no one talks about Steam in Canada. Most people still buy discs like the "World of Warcraft" disc here I believe.

Plus, some games like "The Sims" "Railway Tycoon", "Roller Coaster Tycoon" and other building games are best played with a keyboard and mouse.

In South Korea, and Asian Countrise like China, Taiwan, etc, Starcraft, Warcraft, Diablo, Maple Story, World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy 11, and many other MMO titles for the PC do very well in Asia.
 
I think Game stores don't like PC games since it is illegal, and not possible to resell PC games because License keys can only be used once by one owner on one computer according to the software license.

Game stores also make most of their money by selling used console games for high prices, and make less money selling new games since they need to split the profits with the game maker, delivery, advertising, and other people involve in making, and shipping the game to stores.

Plus, Gamestop, EB world, etc are kind of small compared to computer and electronic stores like Bestbuy which has a bigger wall for each type of console, and PC games.
 
PC games are not illegal, but it is illegal for the owner and store re-sell a softwars key and software since once the key is activated, it can't be used by anyone else except for the first buyer of the game who activated the key when they install the software like how you are not allowed to sell your copy of Windows and the OS serial key to another user.
 
I think froggy means to say they can be pirated easily. However, In my opinion, PC Gaming is not dead. Infact, PC has the best gaming experience from graphics to gameplay!
 
I agree PC gaming has the best gaming experience and graphics. It is also slowly getting more affordable since it is now cheaper to make faster computer parts for gaming PCs, so in a few years a gaming PC may cost $500 more or less.

If you know how to build a computer, you can build a pretty decent gaming PC for $500 dollars which can play most games at medium or even high settings.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbCz0Q85hsM
 
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