Steam breaks concurrent user record with 28m players

pcgamesinsider.biz:

Steam has once again broken its own record for concurrent users, attracting over 28 million players at the same time over the weekend.

That's according to SteamDB, which reports that Valve's platform hit 28,230,853 simultaneous users at around 14:00 UTC on Sunday, January 9th. This is just the latest in a long tear of record breaking that Steam has achieved in recent years, mostly owing to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.

In fact – per Niko Partners' Daniel Ahmad – that 28 million stat is approaching double the record for concurrent players that Steam boasted back in January 2019. At the start of 2020, Valve's platform hit 18.8 million users, while by April this had soared to 24.5 million players.

December of 2020 saw this record broken once again with the release of Cyberpunk 2077 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive helping attract 24.8 million concurrent users. Within a month this feat had once again been outdone, with 25.4 million users clocking in during January 2021. By November of that year, the record for concurrent users was 27.4 million players.