Valve, which has been notorious for holding its sales numbers private, has decided to crack the door open ajar to let us look at their retail numbers going back to the original Half Life.

Some of the numbers are surprising, like Garry’s mod selling over 300,000 units, but others like Half Life’s 9 million units is to be expected.  Missing from the list right now is newcomer, Left 4 Dead.  My assumption would be that the game is realtively new, so they do not have numbers available as of yet.

What the numbers do not show is sales via Steam, and that is the big question that everyone would like to find out.

Valve has long kept Steam numbers close to the vest, and even with these retail numbers, are not giving out any details on how the online download service is doing.  Most feel that Steam is very healthy, and putting up very good numbers.  Even the sales numbers show a trend of retail products going down in units vs. the rise of the Steam service and its popularity.  While Gabe Newell has said that they do not feel the need to release Steam numbers, it would be nice to release them, just to quell the “PC Gaming is dead” crowd.

via Joystiq.com