Market Share and Impact
Many major publishers have large catalogs available on Steam, including Bethesda Softworks, Activision, Rockstar Games, Electronic Arts, Square Enix, 2K Games, Namco, LucasArts, Sega and more.
Sales figures for Steam have not been released by Valve. However, Stardock, the previous owner of competing platform Impulse, estimated that, as of 2009, Steam had a 70% share of the digital distribution market for video games. In early 2011, Forbes reported that Steam sales constituted 50 to 70% of the $4 billion market for downloaded PC games and that Steam offered game producers gross margins of 70% of purchase price, compared with 30% at retail. In 2011, Steam served over 780 petabytes of information, double what it had delivered in 2010.
Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale sold more than 140,000 units, which its localization distributor, Carpe Fulgur, attribute in part to Steam and its sales. Magicka sold 30,000 copies on its day of release in January 2011, and went on to sell 200,000 in 17 days. Garry's Mod sold 312,541 in its first two years and reached 1,000,000 after five years with yearly sales growth of 33%.
In November 2011, it was revealed by the developer of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings that Steam was responsible for 80% of the online sales of the game.
Bethesda stated that by May 2012, over 13.6 million mods had been downloaded for Skyrim through the Steam Workshop feature of the Steam client, considering the service a success.
Read more about this topic: Steam (software)
Famous quotes containing the words market, share and/or impact:
“I respect not his labors, his farm where everything has its price, who would carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to market, if he could get anything for him; who goes to market for his god as it is; on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruit, but dollars; who loves not the beauty of his fruits, whose fruits are not ripe for him till they are turned to dollars. Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“... one of the blind spots of most Negroes is their failure to realize that small overtures from whites have a large significance ... I now realize that this feeling inevitably takes possession of one in the bitter struggle for equality. Indeed, I share it. Yet I wonder how we can expect total acceptance to step full grown from the womb of prejudice, with no embryo or infancy or childhood stages.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 10 (1962)
“Too many existing classrooms for young children have this overriding goal: To get the children ready for first grade. This goal is unworthy. It is hurtful. This goal has had the most distorting impact on five-year-olds. It causes kindergartens to be merely the handmaidens of first grade.... Kindergarten teachers cannot look at their own children and plan for their present needs as five-year-olds.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)