Valve's Steam Analyzed In Infographic

It's in vogue right now to say that PC gaming is dead. When we talk about digital downloads in the marketplace, it's always sexier to talk about Xbox Live or the PlayStation Network. But there's a new infographic that shows just how strong of a segment those people with their mousepads and keyboards still are. In fact, some of these numbers might shock you.

The infographic, which comes to us from VideoGameDesignSchools and can be seen in its ridiculously long entirety here, looks specifically at Steam's place in the PC gaming market. The digital download platform owned by Valve has become the ubiquitous place to find downloadable games, whether you're on a Windows or Mac computer. So for example, the graphic shows that 40 million people have a Steam account. That's the same number of Xbox Live users. Surprised?

Here are a couple other interesting stats – in 2011, more than 780 petabytes worth of games and content was downloaded by users. It would take more than one million Macbook Pro computers to house that kind of data. And during Steam's big holiday sale last year, the highest number of people logged into the service at once was more than 2.5 times the number of people who streamed the Royal Wedding. Of course, you can't have a Steam story without talking about EA, which has selfishly pulled its new content from Steam and developed its own proprietary download platform. So games like Mass Effect 3 won't be on Steam, even though every other major PC game publisher still distributes through Steam. Nevertheless, as the graphic shows, Steam isn't going anywhere any time soon.

[via Gamerant]