"PC gaming is dead."
We've heard that claim a lot in the past but if the stats on Valve's Steam PC game download service are accurate, there are not only quite a lot of PC players out there still, but that their numbers are actually growing. Steam's stats page shows that the service had over 5 million concurrent users online earlier this week for the first time ever. The peak of 5,012,468 was reached around mid-day on Monday.
Valve most likely benefited from its recently concluded massive holiday sales event which ran through the final two weeks of the holiday season of 2011-2012. The sale offered massive discounts on nearly all of Steam's 1,000 + games in its digital catalog. In addition, Steam has also been helped by the PC sales success of Bethesda Softworks's hit RPG The Elder Scrolls V Skyrim. The game has been the highest played game on Steam since its launch last November.
Steam reached the four million concurrent user mark back in September 2011 but reached the three million player mark a year before that. The jump from four to five million concurrent users on Steam only took four months. Any way you look at it, it's clear that there is still a huge audience out there for PC gaming and instead of shrinking it could actually be getting bigger.
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