Valve has revealed some updated information about the status of its Steam software and the number of people that use it. Showing growth year on year, Steam now has regular instances of as many as 14 million people playing at the same time using the platform. It also reaches as many as 33 million players every single day.
Steam is the big boss of the digital distribution, game sale market, but it's also the top dog when it comes to player numbers. While it's arguable that League of Legends' and a number of mobile games have larger total audiences, Steam is by far the biggest platform on PC.
What's perhaps more important though is that it's consistently growing. During the stat reveal at this weeks' Casual Connect gaming conference (via Geekwire), Valve unveiled that along with having 67 million active players every single month, it had brought in 27 million new buyers since January 2016. That's a lot of new PC gamers.
While they don't all play anymore, Steam's lifetime user numbers are said to be around 125 million.
Valve has only been able to be as successful with Steam as it is though, because of the support of developers. If games weren't released on the platform, it wouldn't be able to draw in players like it has done. Valve believes that it's its open platform and gamers-first approach that makes this happen.
Some may argue that at this point Steam is too big to fail - that if you don't release your game on there then your game may not be successful. That's certainly an argument to be made, especially when Valve pulls in 30 percent from every game sale. It's certainly not going to want for money for some time.
