Steam starts the year with new concurrent user record
Steam celebrated a new concurrent users record yesterday with a mind-boggling number of 33,675,229 people being online at the same time, which is about 77,000 more users than the most recent record before that from March 2023. Over ten million users were actively playing games during this peak, an enormous number.
About two million people played Counter-Strike and Dota, so two of Valve’s own games, while the rest of the top five was made up by the two battle royale titles Apex Legends and PUBG as well as – what else? – 2023’s GOTY Baldur’s Gate 3, which continues to show impressive triple digit player numbers.
It's hard to get around using Steam as a PC gamer these days.
Steam
Valve’s platform is the most popular and important store and launcher on PC. Its growth is a solid indicator for PC as a whole doing well – a trend that’s been going on for a while now and has clearly proven analysts spelling its doom in the face of consoles and mobile devices wrong. Speaking of mobile, Steam Deck users have, naturally, counted towards this record number as well, though they likely make up a small fraction of the total at this point.
It’s quite significant that Steam was able to beat its old record again. It shows that Valve was able to consolidate the gains from the COVID-19 pandemic and even successfully build on them, which is not something that everyone in the industry benefiting from that time managed to do.
While platforms like the Epic Games Store and GOG have their place in the ecosystem, Steam is continuing to dominate the market.
