Valve’s massively popular digital storefront Steam now has over one billion registered accounts to its name, which is roughly one seventh of the population of the planet.
As reported by PCGamesN, the one billionth account belongs to someone with the Steam ID ‘amusedsilentdragonfly.’ It’s unclear if they’re going to win a prize, but I think they should either get a voucher for a few hundred quid or a surprise visit from Gabe himself. I’d probably just take the voucher.
Of course, as PCGamesN points out in its report, a huge number of those one billion accounts are likely to be duplicates, scams, bots, or people who keep making new accounts because they forget all of their details and keep getting locked out of Steam.
That last one definitely hasn’t happened to me like three times in the last five or six years. No sir.
While we can probably safely assume that hundreds of thousands of those one billion accounts – if not more – aren’t exactly authentic, there’s no getting round the fact that even close to one billion is a mighty impressive number.
What’s also impressive is the fact that Steam has over 90 million active monthly users (47 million daily), as confirmed by Valve a few months back. This number is up from 67 million just over a year before, which is incredible growth – fuelled no doubt by the platforms rise in popular in China.
While Steam certainly still has the numbers on its side, the Epic store is very much on the rise, thanks in no small part to a surge in deals that the Fortnite publisher makes to keep games exclusive to Epic and off Steam.
A lot of these deals, most notably Metro Exodus and the upcoming Borderlands 3, have not gone down well with fans who are used to pretty much everything being on the Steam store. As a result of these exclusivity deals, the Borderlands and Metro games that are on Steam have been review bombed as an attempt at protest.
No, I don’t really understand how that’s supposed to work either.
Epic boss Tim Sweeney did recently take to Twitter to suggest the company would drop their dogged pursuit of exclusives if Steam commit to an 88% revenue share for all developers. Valve has yet to respond to Sweeney’s offer, if indeed it was a genuine offer.
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Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.