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Steam races ahead of Xbox Live with 65 million accounts

Valve has announced a 30 per cent increase in user accounts in the last 12 months, skyrocketing ahead of Xbox Live.

Michelle Starr Science editor
Michelle Starr is CNET's science editor, and she hopes to get you as enthralled with the wonders of the universe as she is. When she's not daydreaming about flying through space, she's daydreaming about bats.
Michelle Starr
2 min read

Valve has announced a 30 per cent increase in user accounts in the last 12 months, skyrocketing ahead of Xbox Live.

(Credit: Valve)

Over 65 million gamers have created an account on Valve PC gaming platform Steam, the company has announced — a rise of 30 per cent in the last 12 months, which puts the previous figure somewhere in the region of 46 million.

This means that Steam is now well ahead of Xbox Live, which, according to Microsoft, has around 48 million accounts — but still behind PlayStation Network, with its 110 million.

Of the over 3000 games on the platform, DotA 2 is the most popular, with over half a million players daily, followed by Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Sid Meier's Civilization V and Terraria.

With the company's recent announcements, the platform is set to expand even further. Last month, Valve unveiled SteamOS, the Steam Machine gaming PC and the Steam Controller, due out next year, as a bid to enter the living-room war — the battle between Sony and Microsoft to create a holistic entertainment system.

"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," said Valve co-founder and president Gabe Newell. "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."