Having enjoyed a whopping 30 percent growth in active accounts within the last one year, Steam can now boast of more than 65 million active users who’re taking benefits of its services. With more and more new features being infused into Valve’s digital distribution platform every now and then, it looks all set to break many a milestone in the future.
To start with, there’s the support for Linux which is being shown good response to by some developers. While Valve has a few of its own games available for the said platform, more titles from other developers too are all set to make their way onto Steam.
By introducing Family Sharing, Valve’s service reached another big milestone in September this year. This big feature opened the doors for Steam users to be able to share their library of games with their friends and family members, albeit with a few restrictions of course.
And then there were the Steam Trading Cards. Another one of the service’s innovative traits is its recently launched Early Access program which allows gamers to purchase work-in-progress titles. And who can forget the addition of Steam Greenlight which helped provide another great platform for indie developers.
Valve’s conviction to push Steam right into the living rooms of gamers went beyond the Big Picture mode with the announcement of Steam Machines, the SteamOS and the a Steam Controller. All these products are slated to make their way out in the open sometime in 2014, but there’s no particular time frame which can be looked forward to. All that talk about everything, but we still don’t have anything official on Half-Life 3. It’s okay Valve, we’ll do what we’ve been doing for years on the trot – wait!