Digital game online storefront Steam today announced 30 percent growth in active accounts during the last 12 months, bringing the company's total to 65 million. The increase in users puts the cross platform game distribution service ahead of Microsoft's Xbox Live user base which totals 48 million active users.
"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 Gabe Newell, co-founder and president of Valve. "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."
Valve looks to expand Steam’s services and offerings to gamers and developers by holding the Steam Developer Days in Seattle, WA this January and rolling out the recently announced Steam Machines with a variety of hardware partners later in the year. More than 3,000 titles are currently available for purchase on the platform, with many being playable on OS X and Linux.