The recent holiday sales most likely drove phenomenal sales. More importantly is that for the developers of the games, they get very hard statistics on game sales, price points and platform.
Steam is one of the few DRM based systems that actually provides value for consumers rather than restricting.
I don't think the data to developers is very useful. I mean let's say you are selling 30 copies per day at $20. Steam sells it for $2.50 during the holiday sale and you sell 3,000 copies that day. What useful data could you get other than "holy crap, Steam promotions get a ton of sales"?
I think that that is the relevant data. It helps game makers understand what the best price points are for their product and how changing that price point over time can reinvigorate sales.
I personally think that the game industry's pricing is out of whack with the rest of consumer entertainment. A cd costs between $10-16 (on iTunes the pricing difference is similar for tracks), movies cost $9-13, a hardbound book sells for $12-20 and a new game can cost $50-60. The usual justification is that AAA games cost a lot of money to make. But AAA movies cost far more and AAA pop music and promotion also costs similarly large numbers. Yet I pay 4-6 times that price for a game, even if the production cost is a fraction of the other mediums..
Steam does a few things that are interesting IMHO:
1) It makes it clear to game authors that $50-60 is not a good price point anymore, volume increases significantly at the lower price point, so much so that total revenue (and profit) also increase.
2) Digital distribution of games is popular and works really really well.
3) Those two effects combines can grow the consumer base for these products. People that didn't get into gaming before because it simply cost too much, can get into it now if a well known, well reviewed game costs $5 and the Steam platform is free.
I think you're right that digital distribution is the future, games are expensive, Steam's DRM is sort of acceptable, Valve is a cool company, etc. I'm totally with you on all of that.
However, this data is not useful.
All this objectively tells us is that Steam has 20 million users and can drive a ridiculous number of sales for a deeply discounted product on an extremely well publicized holiday sale.
I've always admired Valve redefining the entire concept of space-time with Valve Time :) (oh, and for the other stuff too).
(As an aside: I love the narrators pronunciation of "id software" - is that common in the states? [we would pronounce it very differently here and I didnt expect it!])
The name of the company is currently written with a lowercase id, which is pronounced as in "did" or "kid", and is presented by the company as a reference to the id, a psychological concept introduced by Sigmund Freud. Evidence of the reference can be found as early as Wolfenstein 3D with the statement "that's Id, as in the id, ego, and superego in the psyche" appearing in the game's documentation. Even today, id's History page makes a direct reference to Freud.[17]
However, when working at Softdisk, the team that later founded id Software took the name "Ideas from the Deep" (a company created by John Romero and Lane Roathe in 1989), attributing themselves as the "IFD guys". Since "id" can be seen as a shortening of IFD to "ID", some have been led to believe that it can be pronounced "eye-dee". The logo was originally capitalized, but was made lowercase with the release of Doom. It has never been the mixed-case "iD".
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JXDELFoSLU
Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgBkIg9gKYY
Part 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mZ9lKptKb0
Part 5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6aA2svGfvc
Part 6: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uhpj5XQEOA