While it’s true that the video game industry as a whole has seen rapid growth and expansion over the past couple of years, few companies' success has been as well-tracked asSteam’s. The PC gaming storefront publically shares metrics that have made clear that not only hasSteamgrown in overall players and usage, but also how individual games on the platform have grown in popularity. Today marks another victory for Steam, it seems, as the platform has yet again broken its own record for concurrent overall users online.
On November 27, for the first time in Steam’s history, the platform climbed above 27 million concurrent users online. That means that there were 27 million individualSteam accountsall logged in at the same time. The peak occurred Saturday morning around 7:00 AM PT/10:00 AM ET, a typical high water timeframe for Steam each week. The exact number of Steam’s record is 27,182,164 total players.
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While the exact reasoning for November 27 marking a new record in concurrent players on Steam is likely multifaceted, there are definitely a few key points. First, it’s Thanksgiving weekend in the United States and that typically coincides with a significant user jump due to holiday-related vacations. Second,Valve’s Autumn Salebegan November 24, pulling in Steam users from across the world with discounts on major game releases from the past year. Third, Saturdays are always high in total players, though Sundays routinely outperform them.
The record, by no means, puts the prior one to shame. Steam’s previous record for concurrent users was set in April earlier this year and the number then was just 26.9 million. However, those numbers start to stand out when considering that prior to 2020, Steam had never crossed 20 million concurrent users. It was thepandemic shutdown of March and April 2020that first helped Steam cross that number, a spike it wouldn’t reach again until December 2020. Steam then grew month to month from late 2020 through April 2021, a situation that could repeat itself this year.
While there’s a lot of truth in the fact that the pandemic has played a role inSteam’s rapid growthover the past two years, it’s more than that. More and more people are using PCs, and more and more people are spending time playing major game releases
The era of the live service game has proven very lucrative for Valve’s PC storefront. It may not haveFortnite, butCounter-Strike: Global Offensive,Dota 2,PUBG Battlegrounds,Apex Legends,New World, and the newly releasedHalo Infinitehave all been doing well. Together, they’ve played their part in helpingSteamset a record of over 27 million concurrent users – a record that may be broken again tomorrow, and then in a week, for several months to come.
