Valve: Steam unit sales doubled in 2011

In 2011 Steam sold more than twice as many digital games than the year prior, the platform’s owner Valve said today.

The year-on-year unit sales “increased by more than 100 per cent for the seventh straight year”, read a statement issued by the Washington studio.

Steam now boasts 40 million customer accounts with more than 1,800 games on offer. The platform launched in 2003 and has since become the leading core games platform on PC.

Valve added that its suite of publishing tools, called Steamworks, was integrated into more than 14.5 million registered games on Steam.

"Steam and Steamworks continues to evolve to keep up with customer and developer demands for new services and content," said Valve president Gabe Newell (pictured).

"Support for in-game item trading prompted the exchange of over 19 million items. Support for free-to-play games, launched in June, has spurred the launch of 18 FTP titles on Steam, with more coming in 2012. 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."

The scale of Valve’s digital games operation meant that the company channelled more than 780 Petabytes of data to customers around the world.

During Christmas, the games portal broke new records with 5 million concurrent online users – around an eight of its entire customer base.