Steam witnessed year-over-year sales growth of 158% through the holiday season. Recent success has in part been driven by the debut of Steam’s community features, which will be expanded during 2008, and the release of several best-selling titles such as Call of Duty 4, BioShock, and The Orange Box.
Steam also recently unveiled Steamworks, a suite of free publishing and development tools giving game developers access to product key authentication, copy protection, auto-updating, social networking and matchmaking features.
"PC gaming is thriving, and has evolved into an era of constant connectivity," said Gabe Newell, president of Valve.
"That connectivity gives us the ability to have a much better relationship with customers, not just for delivering our games, but across all aspects of our business - including the design, development, and support of our games.
“Features like Guest Passes, Free Weekends, Gifting, and the Steam Community have been very well received both by customers and the developers who are using Steam.
“We are accelerating our release of new functionality in the next year as well as finding new ways to work with our partners such as the release of Steamworks, which allows them to bring the many benefits of Steam to their packaged products."