Valve’s Steam platform was launched back in 2003, and for much of that time, it saw slow and steady growth as it evolved from a place to buy Half-Life games to the standard PC gaming marketplace. What has happened in the last two years, however, was unbelievable.
In 2015, Steam set a record for concurrent users– the number of people registered with the service – at 10 million people. That was 12 years after the service started.
2017, We reported that Steam had set a new record, this time at 14 million. Not bad growth for just two years.
By March 2020, that record had risen to 20 million. March 2020 is an important point in this timeline; For most countries, this was when the pandemic really took off, lockdowns started, and a lot more people started spending a lot more time online (and realized that you could play a lot of very good video games on Steam, often at very low prices ). .
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We reached 28 million users earlier this year– more than the entire population of countries like Australia and Taiwan – and now, at the end of October, We’ve hit the nice round number of 30 million, with the peak number of users logged in earlier today being 30,032,005.
Note that this is not the number of people playing at the same time, just the number of people logged into the platform, a feat often achieved simply by turning on your PC. If you want to know how many users were actually in a game at that point, according to SteamDB numbers, the peak is around 8.5 million, which is still a massive number, and a (proportionately) big jump even from early 2022 , when the highest value was reached The number of active players is “between seven and eight million”.
