Steam has long since established itself as the dominant force in the digital download world of gaming, but the growth of the platform shows no signs of slowing down. Valve has released some new data showing just how much momentum they actually have.

In 2011, sales grew by a 100% – the seventh consecutive year to have this kind of growth. The Steam Library currently sits at over 1800 games, and the userbase has grown to a substantial 40 million registered accounts. Of course all of these aren’t active, but the number is staggering nonetheless. As for bandwidth, over this year alone 780 Petabytes of data have been downloaded. A petabyte, in case you’re scratching your head, is 1000 terabytes. So that’s 780 million gigabytes of data in a single year – and they say we’re all pirates.

Steamworks has also shown some promise over the year, providing DRM, cloud saving, stats and achievements for over 400 of Steam’s games. The amount of Steamworks games that have been shifted is up to 14.5 million, an impressive 67% increase over last year.

With this steady climb towards a near-monopoly, it’s going to be hard for competitors like Origin to take a significant piece of the pie.

Source: PCGamer