The PC game portal posts some impressive numbers.

If you play PC games, it’s pretty much impossible to not love Steam. Between insane sales (like the recent holiday sale), built-in achievements, and a large selection of games both big and small, it’s tough for competing services like EA’s Origin to keep up. That may seem like an obvious statement, but Valve released some figures today that show just how far ahead the PC digital download portal is.

According to a press release (available to the right), Steam grew to over 40 million accounts in 2011. There are now over 1,800 games on the service;  President and co-founder of Valve Gabe Newell says that a lot more free-to-play games are on the way. Valve has seen great success with the recent transition of Team Fortress 2 into a FTP model, and the company would like to see that success repeated.

Steam increased unit sales by 100% for the seventh year in a row. During the recent holiday sale, the number of simultaneous users on Steam hit a record 5 million. That would explain why some people had difficulties actually downloading their $4.99 copies of games like Mass Effect 2 and Terrarria. Oh, and for the techies out there, Steam delivered over 780 petabytes of data to customers last year. A petabyte is 1000 terabytes for you less tech-minded people out there.

With the PC rapidly becoming the preferred format of the hardest of hardcore gamers in lieu of new home consoles, time will tell if Steam surpasses these impressive numbers in 2012.