Steam has broken the 30 million concurrent users mark

What were you doing this weekend? If you were in the UK, like us, you may have been stuck at home enduring a pretty nasty storm that covered most of our islands for around 48 hours. If you were in the US, you may have watched in horror as our political establishment crumbled, like a poorly constructed fence in a stormy Belfast garden.

If you’re reading this right now and you like gaming, chances are you’re logged in Vapor, though. For the first time, Valve’s PC platform managed to attract more than 30 million users at the same time.

For context, that’s more than the populations of the 50 US states (excluding California). You’d need to collect all the people in the 16 most populous cities in the US to get to 30 million, and all of those people were on Steam at the same time this weekend. Stun the mind.

Although SteamDB charts note that only around 10 million people were actually in the game (read: playing something and not just browsing/idle), the numbers show another massive increase in the record number of concurrent players; the most recent record before that was the almost as impressive 27 million concurrent users registered in November 2021.

The northern hemisphere’s fall/winter period is popular for breaking Steam records; the aforementioned record that was just broken was set at this time of year, and before that, the record of 25 million players was set on January 4, 2021.

Steam has been trending upwards in users since the beginning, actually, but things really started in March 2020 and the Covid-19 pandemic, where the service saw 20 million users for the first time since 2003 (when the game launched). service).

Given the growing success of the Epic Game Store, often backed by exclusives and deals, it’s interesting to see that Steam continues to grow, and at that rate. For a service that will celebrate its 20th anniversary next year, that’s pretty good.