Steam has 70% of the Digital Distribution Market

For a long time the Valve powered Steam service has been thought to dominate the digital distribution market on the PC, but there was little data related on how much of the market share it had. Now the customer report which Stardock, creators of the rival Impulse service, released shines light on the issue.

Brad Wardell, chief executive officer of Stardock, is saying that “Our estimation is that Steam - as the current market leader - enjoys approximately 70 percent of the overall digital distribution market with Impulse at 10 percent and all others combined at 20 percent in terms of actual dollars generated per month”.

In his view, one of the big advantages that the two services have over competitors like GamersGate and Direct2Drive is that they are able to deliver exclusive content, like the Half Life titles and Left 4 Dead for Steam and Sins of a Solar Empire and Demigod for Impulse, which attract interested gamers who then become important customers. In 2009, Stardock is estimating that about a quarter of the revenue for a normal PC videogames publisher is derived from digital distribution.

Wardell has also commented on the issue of Steamworks, the gaming related suite from Valve which is getting integrated into more and more PC games. The CEO of Stardock says that the addition of Steamworks makes titles like Dawn of War II, Empire: Total War and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare 2 virtual untouchables for Impulse. There have been many voices which asked Valve to separate the Steam distribution service from Steamworks.

Stardock is interested in growing Impulse by introducing better community elements and by attracting more publishers for the online store. One of the problems that it will face in the future is the need to maintain different agreements with different divisions of publishers which charge different prices for their videogames.