Popular digital distribution platform Steam has reached a new milestone that shows just how popular the service is and how much potential support the upcoming Steam Machine consoles will have when they are launched later this year.

During the Steam Dev Days conference, Valve announced that Steam has surpassed 75 million total users, more total users than the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, which both have around 70 million total lifetime sales. This is a 10 million increase in users since Valve last revealed their population statistics in October. This is a huge deal for Valve and for Steam. It shows the potential power that Steam Machines may have on the console landscape and may cause previously dismissive executives to take the consoles seriously.

Valve not only announced the new milestone for Steam, but offered a detailed breakdown of the userbase for the service. The company released a chart breaking down the demographics for Steam, which can be seen at IGN. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of the Steam userbase comes from North America and Western Europe, which accounts for 81 percent of all Steam users. However, Steam is gaining ground in other countries as well. Russia had a 128 percent sales increase by users in 2013 in comparison to 2012, and sales increased by 75 percent in Brazil in the same period.

It looks as though everything is looking up for Steam and Valve during this critical time for the company. At the Steam Dev Days, Alienware, one of the companies making a Steam Machine, announced that their version of the hardware will be released in September. This is the first Steam Machine to get a release date, and considering that Valve is working closely with Alienware in the creation of their Steam Machine, it could be one of the better versions of the console.

Before Steam reached its latest milestone, the company broke a new record for total concurrent users, with 7.6 million concurrent users playing the platform at once during 2013. With both of these records showing that Steam is healthier than ever, it looks as though Steam Machines along with the PC version of Steam could be the force to look out for in 2014 and beyond.

Look out for more news right here on Steam as the Steam Machines are launched later in 2014.