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Steam passes 30 million accounts, maintains strong growth

When Valve first unleashed its Steam digital distribution service nearly eight years ago, we can't imagine the company anticipated the kind of growth it's seen. Valve announced this morning that Steam account holders top 30 million in number, and the service has seen its sixth straight year of over 100 percent growth in unit sales versus the previous year.

This year's account numbers have seen near 200 percent in growth as well, swelled at least in part by the addition of Mac OS X to Steam's list of supported operating systems. Steam's virtual infrastructure has been bolstered as well, with Valve claiming it now has "enough bandwidth to ship a digitized version of the Oxford English Dictionary 92.6 times per second." In case it wasn't clear, that translates to butter smooth Team Fortress 2 matchmaking.