Steam Breaks Another Major Player Milestone

gamerant.com:

Steam has just set another record for the most concurrent players just a week after clearing its previous milestone. Valve’s PC gaming outlet has been the go-to platform for digital purchases over the past few decades, giving players access to a vast catalog of classic gems and modern-day hits. Even with the “console wars” between Nintendo, PlayStation, and Xbox raging ever on and the Epic Game Store rising as a new competitor in the PC gaming landscape, Steam still benefits from a large community of users that continues to grow to record-setting numbers.

2023 was an especially fruitful year for Steam, with a historic number of new games being released on the platform over the past few months. 2024 is already continuing this trend with the breakout hit Palworld, which took the gaming world by surprise and gathered a record-setting number of players since it launched on PC in January. As a result, Steam’s player count has been rising to new heights, with the platform recording a record number of over 34 million concurrent users earlier this month.

This meteoric rise in Steam users doesn’t seem to be slowing down, as the platform has already broken the previous milestone a little over a week after it was set. According to the tracking website SteamDB, nearly 36.29 million users were using Steam over the past weekend, with around a third of them actively playing a game. Counter-Strike 2 is currently the top Steam title with roughly 1,291,748 active players as of this writing, with PUBG: Battlegrounds coming in second place with about 678,270. Dota 2, Apex Legends, and Naraka: Bladepoint all round out the top five titles currently being played on Steam.

Steam’s record-setting user count could be fueled by the ongoing Spring Sale promotion, which started over the weekend and is set to run until March 21. It features major discounts on thousands of Steam titles, including recent hits like Starfield, Mortal Kombat 1, and the record-setting Palworld. There are also deals on