American video game development company Valve Corporation has announced that their online gaming platform Steam has surpassed 30 million accounts. This is the platform’s 6th year in a row of over 100% growth in unit sales versus the previous year. This year they have seen almost 200% growth. Part of this year’s growth is because of the launch of Mac OS X support.

Update: NO SALE – Valve says Google isn’t buying the company

The latest acquisition rumor is that Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) may acquire Valve Corporation.  Valve is best known for the games, Half-Life and Counter-Strike.  The rumor was started by “well placed sources” of The Inquirer.

Why would Google buy a gaming company?  Valve has a content distribution system called Steam.  Steam is a way to get download free and paid games to PCs and Macs.  Access to this 24/7 online store  saves consumers time from having to go to a store to buy them.  Steam has about 15 million users that have access to buy 440 games according to TechCrunch.

This deal is completely speculative.  Personally I don’t believe the acquisition will happen because I don’t see the synergy here.  But The Inquirer has it’s sources and at one point I wrote that I did not believe that Google would buy YouTube.  If the acquisition does happen, this blog post will be updated.