It is an excellent day for Steam fans. The video game store has broken its all-time concurrent user record as it saw more than 30 million users being online simultaneously.
According to SteamDB, around 30,032,005 players were online on the game store yesterday. At the same time, the top five games played were, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Dota 2, PUBG: Battlegrounds, Apex legends, and Lost Ark.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive was on top with 1.05 million concurrent players followed by 750,000 peak players from Dota 2 and 442,148 in PUBG.
It is fair to assume that not all 30 million online users were in-game. Many could have been browsing through the store, chatting with friends, or doing other activities on Steam.
When Steam first launched in 2003, a few people knew about it. It was only known as a place where you could download Half-Life games from. Steam’s popularity started to pick up in 2005 when the company decided to allow non-valve games to be sold and played through the platform.
Of course, this is not the first time Steam has broken its concurrent player record. The video game store had set a record of 10 million concurrent users in 2015, 12 years after the service was first launched.
In 2017, Steam was reported to break its previous concurrent player record with 14 million active users. In March 2020, it again broke the record with 20 million users.
Steam broke its concurrent player record multiple times in 2020 as the pandemic kicked off. Covid-induced lockdowns started in many countries, and people began to spend more time online.
In 2021, Steam peaked with more than 27.3 million users over the Thanksgiving weekend. The number rose to 28 million a few months later. Although it fluctuated between those numbers, this is the first time Steam has crossed the 30 million user mark.
With Steam Deck becoming readily available and over 1 million players visiting Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City everyday, Steam has had great success in last few months. The upcoming holiday season and Steam’s Autumn and Winter sale will surely break this new record again.