Things are beginning to heat up in the gaming space as Valve announce a whopping 65 million gamers have created an account on their gaming platform.
This places Steam well ahead of Xbox Live, (who according to recent Microsoft statements sports an impressive 48 million accounts). Valve still has some way to go before it catches up to Sony, whose PlayStation Network platform has an estimated 110 million registered users.
This growth in user accounts bodes well for Valve who recently unveiled SteamOS, the Steam gaming machine and the Steam Controller, all of which are to launch early next year. Either way gloves are about to come off and the looming launch of a Steam games machine could ignite already intense competition in the video games industry.
There's a whole lot at stake with titles such as Call of Duty: Black Ops, taking over US$650million of sales in the its first five days on retailer shelves and the recently launched GTA5 title generating quarterly revenues of $1.27bn. Clearly there's some seriously big money involved. The multi-billion dollar question now becomes one of who will fail and who will prevail once the next generation of gaming hardware launches.
