Steam smashes its own all-time concurrent player peak again
Give thanks.
As our friends across the water settled down after their Thanksgiving celebrations, gaming seems to have been at the forefront of their minds because - would you believe it - Steam's broken its own concurrent record. Yes. Again.
Whilst the number includes players who are idle - that is, signed in but not actively playing anything - Steam's own analytics show that a new peak of 31,349,780 concurrent players was set over the weekend.
As is often the case, third-party tracker SteamDB boasts a slightly different number - a higher figure of 31,379,760 concurrent players - 9.3 of whom were actively online and gaming at the time the record was set.
Steam numbers have been rising steadily since the pandemic began in 2020, with a previous previous peak of just under 30 million set back in March this year. At the end of October, this was broken again - twice - when the PC client clocked up 30,049,264 simultaneous players.
The most played games over the last 24 hours include CS:GO, Dota 2, and PUBG: Battlegrounds, with Modern Warfare 2 taking a respectable fourth place on the chart with a hefty peak of 373,000+ players earlier today.
Lost Ark and Apex Legends follow respectively, which means Modern Warfare 2 is still the only non free-to-play game to feature in the top five of Steam's most-played games list today. GTA 5, Wallpaper Engine, and Naraka: Bladepoint round out the top 10.
I can't help but suspect this record will be challenged once again as we move into the festive period. Watch this space…