It’s the first weekend of the year and everyone seems to be playing games because steam Just saw a new historical user peak.
As spotted on Resetera, a few hours ago Steam hit a new all-time concurrent user record (as of this writing) with a whopping 33,675,229 players. To be clear, these are just players logged into Steam, not necessarily actually in the game. Interestingly though, Steam actually broke that record yesterday, with 10,837,140 players actually playing a game, which is an equally impressive number.
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The last concurrent record for newly logged-in players was in March 2023, which was less than 100,000 less than today’s record, so the increase is quite significant. Why so many people logged into Steam this weekend is anyone’s guess, but my personal opinion is that most people will be reminded of the stress of daily life when they return to work, and the gamers among us need to relax a little more than usual a little. There’s also all the new Steam decks Santa is handing out during the Christmas season, which may help set this record.
While it’s unlikely to encourage more players to log in than usual, Steam has also introduced the ability to hide games in your library through the service’s beta client. That’s right, you no longer have to be embarrassed about adding Overwatch to your Steam library!
The results of the Steam Awards were also revealed earlier this week, with Starfield somehow taking home the “Most Innovative Gameplay” award, which even confused fans of the game. The Game of the Year award was unsurprisingly awarded to Baldur’s Gate 3, while the unexpected hit indie game Lethal Company won the lovely Fun with Friends award.
