The activity of online gameplay via Steam averages over 7 billion player minutes per month. And, staying true to its roots of offering automatic updates for PC games and applications, Steam has served its growing audience a total of over 2,500 updates since its first release.

What began just a few years ago as a solution for auto-updating Valve's multiplayer games has evolved into a platform used by many of today's leading publishers and developers. This summer, more major publishers will announce that they are bringing their games to Valve's platform, using it for electronic distribution and including it in their retail product releases in order to take advantage of features such as anti-piracy, server browsing, marketing promotions and more.

"We've approached the development of Steam the same way we treat our online games; we release something we've tested, we internalize the feedback, and then we release new features and functionality based upon the feedback received," says Gabe Newell, president and co-founder of Valve. "In Steam's case, we have millions of customers who are gamers and dozens of customers who are developers and publishers. In the past year, we've added over 100 new titles from third parties, grown to over 13 million active accounts, and introduced new features such as Guest Passes and Free Weekends. This growth has taught us a lot and inspired many additional features and services that we'll be releasing later this year."