what are you doing this weekend If you’re in the UK like we are, you might find yourself trapped in a house enduring a pretty bad storm that covered most of our islands for about 48 hours. If you were in America, you might have watched with horror as our political system fell apart like a poorly-raised fence in a Belfast garden in a storm.
If you’re reading this right now, and you’re playing a game, chances are you’re already logged in steam, although. For the first time in history, Valve’s PC platform managed to attract more than 30 million simultaneous users.
For context, this exceeds the population of all 50 US states (excluding California). You’d need to gather everyone from the 16 most populous cities in the US to hit 30 million — and all of them are on Steam at the same time this weekend. It’s unbelievable.
While SteamDB’s graph shows that only about 10 million people are actually playing (read: playing stuff and not just browsing/idling), the data shows that the number of concurrent players has increased significantly again; the previous record was November 2021 A nearly staggering 27 million concurrent users tracked monthly.
During the autumn and winter seasons in the northern hemisphere, Steam is hot; the above record just broken was created at this time of year, while the previous record of 25 million players was created on January 4, 2021.
Steam’s users have been on the rise since the beginning, yes, but things really started in March 2020 and the Covid-19 pandemic, when the service recorded 20 million users for the first time since 2003 (when the service launched).
Given the growing success of the Epic Game Store — often backed by exclusives and deals — it’s interesting to see Steam continue to grow at this rate. That’s pretty good for a service that will celebrate its 20th anniversary next year.
