Video Games

Steam starts the year with new concurrent user record

Big numbers for PC gaming’s largest platform

Marco Wutz

Steam starts the year with new concurrent user record
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.

Steam logo in various forms.
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.

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Marco Wutz
MARCO WUTZ

Marco Wutz is a writer from Parkstetten, Germany. He has a degree in Ancient History and a particular love for real-time and turn-based strategy games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, Total War, Age of Wonders, Crusader Kings, and Civilization as well as a soft spot for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. He began covering StarCraft 2 as a writer in 2011 for the largest German community around the game and hosted a live tournament on a stage at gamescom 2014 before he went on to work for Bonjwa, one of the country's biggest Twitch channels. He branched out to write in English in 2015 by joining tl.net, the global center of the StarCraft scene run by Team Liquid, which was nominated as the Best Coverage Website of the Year at the Esports Industry Awards in 2017. He worked as a translator on The Crusader Stands Watch, a biography in memory of Dennis "INTERNETHULK" Hawelka, and provided live coverage of many StarCraft 2 events on the social channels of tl.net as well as DreamHack, the world's largest gaming festival. From there, he transitioned into writing about the games industry in general after his graduation, joining GLHF, a content agency specializing in video games coverage for media partners across the globe, in 2021. He has also written for NGL.ONE, kicker, ComputerBild, USA Today's ForTheWin, The Sun, Men's Journal, and Parade. Email: marco.wutz@glhf.gg

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