Steam Passes 30M Users [Oct 18, 2010, 11:19 am ET] – Share – Viewing Comments
Valve announces that Steam has surpassed the 30 million account mark. Here's word on some of what this represents:
During the past 12 months the platform had year-over-year new user growth of 178%, pushing the total number of active accounts to over 30 million, with over 1,200 games now offered. Peak simultaneous player numbers were also up to over three million, with over six million unique gamers accessing Steam each day.
In addition to new user growth, Steam sales during the trailing 12 months increased by more than 200%, putting it on track for a sixth straight year of realizing over 100% year-over-year growth in unit sales. To meet this demand, the Steam infrastructure has been increased and now has ability to run at 400Gps, enough bandwidth to ship a digitized version of the Oxford English Dictionary 92.6 times per second.
wtf_man wrote on Oct 18, 2010, 23:15:
How can they be "completely anonymous" when they have your CC info?
That's kind of my point. You're expecting anonymity when you surrendered it by registering at all.
What? you don't think they correlate the info they collect with your account info?
They have to do that so that you can have a functional account on their service. Did you think all of your games would just be registered to some random number? How would they verify CC purchases then without names? You do understand that CC processors will not let them accept purchases without it, right? How would they associate those purchases to an internal account ID? Steam doesn't publish your information with identifiable flags or marks. They say "Customers like X game" not "wtf_man plays this, his address is this and his dogs name is Blah".
And it's not just Steam collecting info... you have to sign up with Microsoft GFWL, or EA or other publishers, or the Dev Studio, etc. and they "track and publish your achievements"... and if you "refuse to participate" you can't play your game (My primary complaint in my original post).
You're going to have to give up some info to make a purchase online period but that aside... Yes, they want you to sign up for an account on their service because they want to make it easier for you to purchase more games from them in the future and depending on the ToS, I'm sure some do sell your info or demographics to advertisers. So read the fine print.
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