Steam Hits 15m Users, Reports 158% Holiday Sales Growth

Steam creator Valve has announced that its distribution platform has recently reached more than 15 million users, as its holiday sales grow over 158 percent over the year prior driven by Call of Duty 4, BioShock and Orange Box. The company said that in addition to community features added in September of 2007 like personal profiles, friends lists, groups, instant messaging, text and voice chat, event schedulers, even more unannounced services will be added in the coming year to support forthcoming games like co-op zombie survival title Left 4 Dead. Valve also again noted the recent launch of Steamworks, a suite of free publishing and development tools giving developers access to amongst others, Steam's real-time stats, auto-updating and matchmaking utilities. Said Valve president Gabe Newell, "PC gaming is thriving, and has evolved into an era of constant connectivity. That connectivity gives us the ability to have a much better relationship with customers, not just for delivering our games, but across all aspects of our business - including the design, development, and support of our games. Features like Guest Passes, Free Weekends, Gifting, and the Steam Community have been very well received both by customers and the developers who are using Steam. We are accelerating our release of new functionality in the next year as well as finding new ways to work with our partners such as the release of Steamworks, which allows them to bring the many benefits of Steam to their packaged products."