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Developers Valve revealed this weekend that its digital distribution platform Steam saw a significant increase in sales year on year in 2009, climbing by a massive 205%.

According to the company, who has been responsible for the likes of Half Life and Left 4 Dead, this "extraordinary growth" signals "the fifth straight year the platform has realized over 100% year-over-year growth in unit sales."

Shack News also reports that “active accounts” rose by 25% to some 25 million users – 10 million of whom have Steam community profiles.

"The peak number of concurrent users eclipsed the 2.5 million mark during the month of December," revealed Valve, this was surely bolstered by the likes of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which requires Steam for online play. In addition the company increased its "average monthly player minutes" to 13 billion.

"Steam turned five years old in March 2009," commented Valve president Gabe Newell. "With the introduction of each new platform feature released over the years--such as the Steam Community, Steam Cloud, and Steamworks - we've seen corresponding growth in account numbers, concurrent player numbers and developer support for the platform. As such, we plan to continue to expand and grow the platform to better serve the developers supporting the open platform and millions of gamers logging in each day."

While Steam has traditionally not been very popular in South Africa due to our exorbitant bandwidth prices, slowly increasing caps and a gradual shift towards more affordable per-GB rates from the likes of Afrihost are slowly making it a more viable solution.

Furthermore, WebAfrica is scheduled to include Steam in its Freezone any day now, which will theoretically allow its customers access to the full Steam network without using any bandwidth. If successfully implemented, this could potentially have a substantial effect on the local PC gaming market.

However, even if WebAfrica does deliver on its promises, retail box sales on PC games are not likely to be drastically affected due to the fact that they often undercut the cost of games on Steam. Most new AAA Steam games sell for $50 (R375), and as long as local retailers like Zaps and Kalahari can keep the same titles priced at close to R300, they will still offer better value for money.
Local Steam viability is more likely to have an effect on the sale of aging games and indie games as these are often difficult to come by, and Steam hosts impressive specials on these titles on a regular basis.

Games like Plants vs. Zombies, Torchlight, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Trine, Left 4 Dead, Braid and Osmos were all generously discounted over the festive season, a fact which would have contributed significantly to the sales increase reported by Valve.
Specials like this represent the most exciting aspect of local Steam integration, as gamers will have instant access to a massive library of games, a luxury which currently few can afford. 

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