Steam bigger than Xbox Live

Valve’s user base has broken through the 65 million active users mark, making it larger than the Xbox Live subscriber base, but still some way behind Sony’s Playstation Network.

In comparison to other online services, EA Origin boasts 50 million users, Windows Live has 48 million while Sony’s Playstation Network rules with a staggering 110 million accounts.

Valve says that this is a massive jump for the company, increasing their user base from approximately 45 million active subscribers in 2012. The company makes no assumptions about what spurred on the 30% jump, but Valve boss Gabe Newell says they’re not resting on their laurels.

“The main goal of Steam has always been to increase the quality of the user’s experience by reducing the distance between content creators and their audience,” Newell explained.

“As the platform grows, our job is to adapt to the changing needs of both the development and user communities. In the coming year, we plan to make perhaps our most significant collaborations with both communities through the Steam Dev Days and the Steam Machines beta.”

In 2012 Newell publicly acknowledged that he was no longer happy with the way things were progressing on the Windows ecosystem and vowed to make a change in how Valve operated and delivered services to its user base. This culminated into three new products that Valve believes will shape gaming forever – the SteamOS, the Steam controller and the Steam Machines certification.

SteamOS is a Linux-based operating system customised and supported by Valve. Not only will the company ensure that there’s good driver support for the OS, it’ll also spearhead Valve’s efforts to make Linux a gaming-friendly platform. Currently the Steam client is available for Linux operating systems with a roster of over 200 titles currently available.

The Steam controller is a new design from Valve that features touch pads instead of joysticks and, says Valve, provides a much more responsive and PC-like experience. The design resembles parts of the Xbox 360 and Dualshock 3 controller and uses similar haptic feedback technology to the Xbox One’s controller.

The Steam Machines certification is a standard released by Valve that determines the minimum specifications that are required for a computer to be sold as a “Steam machine.” The specification kicks off with an Intel Core i3 processor, 16GB of DDR3 memory, a Geforce GTX660 graphics card and a hybrid solid state drive with 8GB of cache memory and 1TB of storage space.