Stardock CEO, Brad Wardell recently commented about Steam on an article at Edge Online. He found it necessary to give his opinion on the article, ‘The Age Of Steam’. He wrote that while Steam does digital distribution really well, it is not perfect and certainly could do with improvement. He believes that competition is vital to encourage these improvements. He said:
By Valve's own admission, it only has 20 million accounts of which around a million and a half logon each day due to Steam defaulting to auto-starting when someone launches. To put that in perspective, that's about 1/10th the number of users Gamespot or IGN gets in a day.
When one of these services has 20 million active users per day, then I think we can say that they have reached a critical threshold. Right now, however, by Valve's own statistics, about half of Steam users use it for just Counterstrike -- not including all of Valve's other games.
The real test for Steam, however, will be how it does as it faces competition as it becomes more common for titles to be released on multiple platforms at the same time. At that point, responding to customer requests, competitive pricing and quality of service will determine its continued success.
It's far too soon to assume that Steam will continue to dominate five years out. Thus far, it has largely operated without serious competition. With other services such as Impulse, Games for Windows Live, Amazon.com, GamersGate and others upping their own services with unique and compelling features, expanding their catalogs, and focusing on providing good customer experiences, I would be very surprised if Steam continues to have such a large market share (as a percentage) even 18 months from now.
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