Steam Uses One Billion GB of Bandwidth in 2011

By Patrick Stone Published January 06, 2012 at 6:39 pm

Hardware

With the days of physical retail hanging on by a strand, this news shouldn't come as much of a surprise to many of you: Steam's digital distribution service reached an all-time high in 2011, securing 14.5 million game registrations and 40 million accounts.

Steam now has 1,800 games listed in its distribution database with a mere 18 of those being free-to-play, but the company promises many more FTP titles in 2012. Valve has consistently reported a 100% sales increase each year.

During the holiday season alone, Steam reported 5 million simultaneous gamers online.

For those that enjoy hardware, and we know there are a lot of you on our site, here's a fun stat for you: Steam served 780 Petabytes -- that's 817,889,280 Gigabytes -- worldwide in 2011 alone. Unfathomable, we know. Can you imagine having ONE BILLION gigs of hard drive space?

Valve is moving to accommodate its growing demand with solidified network architecture to continue offering its (relatively) fast download service.

Last modified on January 06, 2012 at 6:39 pm

Patrick Stone

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