Image: Valve
This week saw a record-breaking amount of players logging into Steam.
A lot of people are on Steam right now. According to SteamDB, Valve’s game platform saw 10,284,568 concurrent in-game players for the very first time this week. This is a new record high for the platform, with 10 million players actively playing games while a total of 33,078,963 users stayed online.
This happened over the weekend, which shouldn’t come as a surprise since that's when most players would have been at home on their computers, instead of working or going to school. The platform has never seen such massive numbers in its history however, and it’s curious that it should break this record now and not during the winter holiday season.
Steam as a platform has been rapidly gaining popularity ever since the COVID-19 pandemic led to a massive boom in gaming back in 2020, what with more people self-isolating and having time to themselves than ever before. In February 2020, Steam’s concurrent user count reached a new peak of some 18 million, a number that the platform has come close to doubling in the years since.
In January 2022 for example, Steam hit a whopping 29.1 million concurrent users in total. That record has now been well and truly smashed with upwards of 33 million users logging into Steam just yesterday. There’s no real rhyme or reason to any of this - no big game releases we can point to and say, “Aha! No wonder everyone logged in last weekend!” Browsing through the day’s most-played games, you’ll mostly find familiar names in Counter-Strike: GO, DOTA 2, PUBG, Apex Legends and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.
A new game did come in at third place, however, and that's the social deduction game Goose Goose Duck. This Among Us-like game has players work together to find out which of them is secretly an evil duck in disguise. The game has shot up to the top of Steam charts in recent weeks, mostly due to its popularity in China and a member of BTS randomly playing the game during a livestream.