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)
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