Consoles might have been the primary platform for playing video games back in the day but the rapid advance in hardware technology allowed personal computers and PC gaming to gain a slight edge over traditional consoles.

While superior hardware quality did help PCs quite a bit in this overtaking, its success can also be attributed to the digital distribution services that cropped out the cumbersome retail purchase procedure favouring a much quicker and neater gaming experience.

Valve’s digital distribution and multiplayer gaming platform, Steam has been one such system that has shown continuous growth and progress ever since its launch back in 2003. With record-breaking results every year, the platform contributed greatly in bringing the PC gaming sector to where it stands today.

For the seventh straight year, Valve has announced that Steam has witnessed over a 100 per cent boost in their sales. With over 1,800 games now available for sale and 40 million registered accounts, Steam continues to reign top in the digital distribution market by having served over 780 petabytes of data to gamers across the globe in 2011.

While the tale of Steam and PC gaming is a long and interesting one, Valve has already begun spinning new chapters for the platform with it’s implementation on the Mac back in 2010, on the PlayStation 3 last year and rumours running wild about the platform also coming to Microsoft’s Xbox in 2012.

Valve might already be the leader in the digital distribution market but it’s also definitely aiming to take over multiplayer gaming in 2012 with the launch of two of their much-awaited home titles — Counter Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2, both of which are successors to the two most widely played titles.

The seventh generation has been nothing but a phase of setting up for Steam and Valve to spread it’s wings across all branches of the industry. We can stay assured that a platform like Steam might not ever have to look back. Either way, it will prove to be profitable to consumers.