Steam just broke its record for concurrent players
Reaching nearly 28 million simultaneous users on Sunday, this represents Steam's rising user base since August.
As you’re reading this, you likely have Steam running on your computer right now. It’s also likely that you were running the service this past Sunday as well. If so, you’ve helped Steam break a new record and probably didn’t even know it!
According to statistics gathered by SteamDB, Steam broke its record for most concurrent players on Sunday, Jan. 2 at 14:00 UTC with 27,942,306 players online at the same time that day. Just to put that in perspective: if Steam was a city, it would be the third-largest in the world by population. That’s an impressive feat.
Reddit user u/Turbostrider27 first reported on the news. Steam’s playerbase has been steadily increasing since August 2021 and it is the season for the Steam Winter Sale, so this record wasn’t entirely unexpected. Still, it’s an incredible accomplishment that’s deserving of a virtual cheer to all 28 million of you.
Setting a new Steam record: how did it happen?
It’s no secret by now that Steam is the most popular online game store for PCs on the market. Therefore, it’s not exactly a shock that there would be a record-breaking number of Steam users on the service at once. Considering how Steam has continued to grow over nearly twenty years, it’s amazing how it continues to attract so much traffic every day.
Of the nearly 28 million Steam users (which, fun fact, is over three times the population of Austria) online at the time, 8,219,950 were playing a game. This is the most number of in-game players at one time since the COVID-19 pandemic began. The rest were merely signed into Steam at the time.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive was the game with the most players at the time the record broke. Other top-performing games included Dota 2, PUBG: Battlegrounds, and Team Fortress 2 — mostly the usual suspects of Steam games. There doesn’t appear to be any specific outlier that’s responsible for this new all-time high; for Steam, it appears to have just been a very good day.
What do you think of this latest record of concurrent Steam users? Were you one of the nearly 28 million to help achieve this feat? Let us know!
Via Kotaku.
