Valve, as a private company, doesn’t have to disclose its earnings, governance, or a great deal of other information about its own operation. Luckily, there’s third-party analytic firms like SteamSpy to fill in the gap. According to Sergey Galyonkin, the firm — which rose to fame with games like Half-Life and Team Fortress 2, and which now controls the overwhelming majority of the PC digital download space — earned a massive $4.3B in 2017, $800M more than the estimated $3.5B it earned through the same period in 2016. While SteamSpy’s figures can’t account for every bit of revenue Valve might have earned, the data it’s missing from DLC and microtransactions only understate the true size of Valve’s giant.
2017 was the best year for Valve so far: Steam's share of the market grew to $4.3B, not counting in-apps and DLCs.
If you go under the Steam menu to Settings, then Download settings, you should be able to switch to a more exotic locale. For instance, I am currently downloading the rest of Tesla Effect from Sweden. Oct 8, 2012 - Tired of waiting for your game update or new game download? Here's a tip to speed up your connection to Steam and spend your time playing. Its gaming library has more than 2,000 titles and it has approximately 40 million users. To update or for a new one to download -- it's not the speediest process. My download said 'More than a year' My download rate was faultering and it said more than a year. I'm back to my normal speed but I found this hilarious. Has anyone actually had to wait one year to download a game? Just now steam said for 5 mb/s more than a year #12 Showing 1.
If you're at #GDC18, come to my talk at 4PM at 2005 West for even more numbers and graphs. pic.twitter.com/j4a15aBvpZ
— Steam Spy (@Steam_Spy) March 22, 2018
At first glance, this data seems to be nothing but good news for PC gaming, which has often chafed under reports that it’s a fraction the size of the console market. But there’s another issue: The profits overwhelmingly flow to a bare handful of titles. PUBG was always going to be a major heavyweight in 2017, but it hauled in $600M in revenue — dwarfing the earnings of the second-highest selling game, CS: Go, at $120 million. GTA V was in third place, at $83 million. Call of Duty: World War II came in fourth place, with $41 million in earnings from 840,000 copies sold. Of the Top 20 games, seven were released before 2017, including Civilization VI, The Witcher III: Wild Hunt, Rainbow Six Siege, Dark Souls III, and Rocket League. Rounding out the Top 20? Cuphead, with 1.3 million sales and revenue of $22 million.
Of the 21,000+ games available on Steam, fully half of the company’s revenue was delivered by the Top 100 titles. In other words, 0.5 percent of the titles available on Steam delivered 50 percent of the earnings. To some extent, that’s to be expected — some percentage of the games available on Steam are going to be old titles, and the original Half-Life isn’t exactly tearing up the sales charts these days. Then again, 7,672 games were released on Steam in 2017, which puts that 21,000 figure in perspective. That’s up from 565 in 2013, 1,772 in 2014, 2,964 in 2015, and 4,207 in 2016.
As Ryan noted earlier this year, PUBG was hauling in more players than multiple Steam games combined.
These figures suggest two things: First, that computer gaming is following the movie and music industries in squeezing out what used to be thought of as the ‘middle’ of the market. With skyrocketing dev costs and Steam becoming an endless morass of games, there’s less and less room between being big enough to catch the notice of a core group of gamers (or streamers, or influencers, or what-have-you) and vanishing into the abyss, never to be heard from again. In movies and music, these trends have played out differently — the movie industry may currently be suffering from an over-reliance on tentpole franchise films, for example — but the push and pull between the biggest box office draws or musicians and everybody else continues to favor the biggest, most-entrenched operators in all three genres.
I wouldn’t try to draw too many cross-genre parallels out of this, but there are some interesting similarities. Of course, one major difference between the gaming industry and movies or music is Steam itself. With 80 percent+ of the game distribution market, Steam has a lock on gaming that no other media outlet has ever enjoyed. Gamers, at least thus far, continue to view this as a good thing.
After reading this, it seems as though purchasing more than one game on a single steam account limits the flexibility of how you can use a game.
I understand why Steam did this and am not trying to complain about it. However, it does seem that creating a separate steam account for each game is advantageous.
Pros
- It doesn't cost any money
- It allows you to play different online games at a time
Cons
- The community features of steam are made almost un-usable as they are designed for one account per person (not multiple accounts per person)
- Creating multiple accounts eliminates some of the convenience of using steam, especially when switching between different games and getting game updates when you boot up.
I understand that trading, selling or transferring accounts is specifically banned by theUser Agreement. But I cannot see anywhere that restricts a single person from registering multiple accounts (1 per game).
Does anyone do this, and should I be doing this with new steam purchases?
5 Answers
It doesn't cost nothing - it costs time and convenience to create different accounts and log in to them all separately when you want to change which account you are using.
I searched through the User Agreement. I think you're correct in that this is not specifically prohibited. Similarly, using multiple accounts to purchase multiple copies of the same game and multibox is not specifically prohibited (to my knowledge).
If you are the kind of person that would actually want to play different games at the same time, it does make sense. However, I cannot think of a legitimate reason to actually want to play multiple different Steam games at once. I have a hard enough time being good at any 1 game I'm playing.
Should you be doing this? In my opinion, no. I use the community-oriented features of Steam all the time and the Cons you list would affect me greatly. Having multiple accounts would be a tremendous inconvenience for me, and I don't care about any of the Pros you list.
Exceptions: There may be some games where it would make sense to have a separate account for just that game. I hear you do a lot of sitting around in games like Eve Online; perhaps you would want to play Bejeweled while you wait for something to happen?
There are other reasons to do this:
In my house, we started off with one steam account. As my son got older, he enjoys playing games on the account, but that prevents me from playing ANY of my games on my other computer while he is doing so. Why should I be prevented from playing Civilization 5, Skyrim, or Fallout 3 just because he wants to play Half-Life 2?
Steam Download More Than 1 Year Full
So I started making new accounts so that we could both access Steam's library. (Personally, I think it's ridiculous that I'm forced to do so, considering they are different games.)
I like the simplicity of how they run things, but you can see how it would be a real problem for someone like me.
Steam Download More Than 1 Year Free
You dont need multiple accounts to play different games on the same computer. I have access to two computers, both of which have steam on them; so somtimes when i have a friend over and we both want to play one of my steam games one of us will log onto steam and then go into offline mode, the nthe other will log on and voila. Two steam games at the same time.
Personally, no I have never done this. For me there are a few things you should take into consideration.
If you are running a game from Steamyou want friends to be able to seewhat game you are in. This of coursewould mean your friends would have toknow every account you had for everygame. This seems like it would betrouble for both you, and yourfriends.
Every game you install in steam has amanual path you can go to on thecomputer. If you want to run morethan one game at a time, you might be able to through the manual executable (Test your game and see). Themajority of the time I do not evenrun games through Steam, I simplyhave them installed by steam. Just goto your steamapp folder and manuallyrun your executable to test.
- One of the main advantages of Steamfor me is that I can at any time redownload the game from one account.Meaning, if I delete the game becauseI am tired of it, I can simply redownload it again one year later whenI feel like playing it again. Thisbecomes extremely confusing if youwant to try what you are suggesting.(If it is even possible.)
I personally suggest one account, and if you want to run more than one game at a time, then see if the game requires Steam to run.
The only true advantage of account/email per game is that you can sell it when you are done - the game/email/account. If all your games are linked to one account/email then you cannot do this. One of the biggest reasons behind the steam model (and why console games are more and more coming with 'online' codes) is to eliminate used game sales. Personally, I never sale old PC games cause I don't want to have to help people install/setup, but for someone who just wants to play and beat a game then move on this is one way to do it.
And yes, as long as you have unique emails address you can do this...