If you’re reading this now, and you’re into games, you were likely logged into Steam, though. For the first time ever, Valve’s PC platform managed to attract over 30 million users all at the same time. For context, that’s more than the populations of all 50 US states (excluding California). You’d need to gather everyone from the US’ most 16 populous cities in order to reach 30 million – and all those people were on Steam at the same time this weekend. It boggles the mind. Though graphs from SteamDB note that only about 10 million people were actually in-game (read: playing something and not just browsing/idling), the numbers show yet another massive increase in the record number of concurrent players; the most recent record before that was the nearly-as-impressive 27 million concurrent users tracked back in November 2021. The Northern hemisphere autumn/winter period is popular for Steam smashing records; the aforementioned record that was just broken was set around this time of year, and before that the 25 million player record was set on January 4, 2021. Steam has been on an upwards trend in users since the beginning, really, but things really kicked off in March 2020 and the Covid-19 pandemic, where the service logged 20 million users for the first time since 2003 (when the service launched). Given the rising success of the Epic Game Store – often propped up by exclusives and deals – it’s interesting to see Steam continue to grow, and at such a rate. For a service that’ll be celebrating its 20th anniversary next year, that’s pretty good going.
