Deadlock and AION 2 were among the most-played games during Steam’s user surge last weekend.
Valve’s massive PC gaming storefront, Steam, has recorded its highest-ever concurrent user count, with 43.5 million users online simultaneously last Sunday (11 October). This marks an increase of 1.5 million users from its previous record, set in January this year.
What games helped Steam break its new concurrent user record?
Steam partly has its extensive library of games to thank for its enormous user base, including a wide range of free-to-play titles, making it a go-to platform for many PC gamers. Last weekend, several popular games played a major role in driving its latest surge in concurrent users.
The platform’s most popular titles were largely Valve’s own games, with Counter-Strike 2 leading the charts at a peak of 1.4 million players, followed by Dota 2 at one million. Valve’s unreleased title, Deadlock, also broke into the top 10 most-played games that weekend, reaching an all-time high of 262,145 concurrent players. The game has set consecutive peak player records since launching its ‘City Never Sleeps’ campaign, which introduced a major overhaul and six heroes over the following weeks.
Other popular games included PUBG: Battlegrounds, which peaked at 713,683 players, and the newly-released AION 2, which reached 397,905. Titles like WARDOGS, ARC Raiders, Apex Legends, RUST, and Delta Force have also regularly attracted daily peaks of more than 100,000 players on the platform.
Steam’s growth could continue with several highly anticipated games arriving soon. Star Wars: Galactic Racer has just launched on the platform, while Planet Zoo 2, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 and Phantom Blade Zero are also expected to arrive this month.
How many Steam users are there?
According to SteamDB, Steam reached a new record of 43.5 million concurrent users on Sunday, 11 October. That represents an increase of around 1.5 million users over its previous peak of approximately 42 million, recorded in January 2026.
Valve’s digital storefront has continued to expand in player numbers in the past decade. In 2018, Steam surged past 18 million concurrent users, fuelled by the explosive popularity of PUBG: Battlegrounds. Two years later, the platform surpassed 20 million concurrent users amid COVID-19 lockdowns.
Since then, Steam’s peak concurrent user count has generally risen by several million every year, with new records being set at an accelerating pace. In October 2025, the platform reached 41.7 million concurrent users during the launch period of EA’s Battlefield 6.
Instead of being driven by a single game, the latest record of 43.5 million concurrent users saw the combined popularity of numerous titles on the platform, many of which attract hundreds of thousands of players simultaneously.
