Valve’s digital video-game distribution server, Steam, initially showed a slow uptake of players on PC. This was followed by a major spike in users during the covid pandemic. Despite many believing it would end there, it didn’t, and Steam has continued to grow, setting a new record.
That’s right! This past weekend, Steam has broken all of its past records by hitting 30,012,957 players at the same time. This staggering number of concurrent players was released courtesy of Steam’s own charts. However, SteamDB confirmed the numbers were actually slightly higher at 30,032,005.
Putting this number in perspective, this is roughly the population of Ghana, a country in Africa. Ghana is also the 48th most populated country in the world. This is an impressive statistic for Steam and also shows the continued growth of PC gaming.
This sudden growth and spikes in numbers prove that PC gaming has stuck around far longer than many expected after the global lockdowns. Considering that it took the platform 14 years to grow its user base to 15 million, the concurrent user records doubled to 30 million in the span of five years.
According to the Steam charts, the most played game at the time of the record-breaking number of concurrent users was Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, with a player count of 1,050,184. This is closely followed by Dota 2 and PUBG: Battlegrounds.
With the platform working hard to add an exciting range of AAA and Indie games, as well as porting Playstation and rumors of a Nintendo Switch emulator coming to Steam Deck; we look forward to seeing what comes next for Steam.
