To put into perspective just how much Valve has grown, Gabe Newell claims that a recent DotA 2 update accounted for 2% of all mobile and land internet data.
Valve is a very big company. Steam accounts for the vast majority of digital PC game sales. Team Fotress 2 and DotA 2 are two of the most played multiplayer games of all time. Steam Greenlight sees dozens of new indie titles introduced to the platform every month. So when Gabe Newell claims that its business has increased 50% over the last year, it makes sense. But it’s still quite a staggering statistic.
Newell claimed that the growth had a lot to do with user-generated content, such as paid-for things like TF2 hats and DotA 2 items, as well as the hundreds of free mods available on games which utilize the Steam Workshop, like Skyrim and Natural Selection 2. “There’s sort of an insatiable demand for gaming right now,” Newell said. “I think our business has grown by about 50 percent on the back of opportunities created by having these open platforms.”
If that statistic wasn’t jaw-dropping enough, in an effort to put into perspective just how big the software (and soon to be hardware) giant has become, Newell claimed that a recent patch for DotA 2 accounted for 2% of all internet traffic. “We were generating 3.5 terabits per second during the last DotA 2 update. That’s about 2 percent of all the mobile- and land-based Internet activity.”
Valve recently announced that DotA 2 has the most concurrent users of any Steam game ever. If anything in Valve’s library is going to take a chunk out of the internet, it’s DotA 2. DotA 2 is technically still in an “invite-only” beta (although invites are selling on the Steam Marketplace for mere cents). If it’s pulling these kind of numbers now, we can only imagine how big it will get when it’s officially released.
The company’s massive growth certainly kills dead any rumors that Valve letting go a number of employees earlier this year is a sign that it is struggling.
PS: Do I even need to say that Newell declined to comment on the status of Half-life 3 or is that just an assumed thing now?
Source: PC Gamer
Image: Art of Jin
