Steam breaks its concurrent user record with a whopping 27.9 million players
Steam is already having a good year.
Image: Valve
2022 has barely begun, but that isn’t stopping Steam from having a great year. The online platform has just broken its concurrent user record with a whopping 27.9 million users, marking the store’s highest-ever to date. 8.2 million of those users were actively playing games at the time, too.
This timing makes sense, if you think about it. Many Steam users worldwide were likely returning to work and school this week, and probably viewed last weekend as their last chance to get some game time in. Steam has seen more and more users join the platform since early 2020, when the ongoing pandemic first began to keep people in their homes. In February 2020, Steam’s user base peaked with a record 18.8 million.
Since then, the platform’s concurrent user record has been broken multiple times as more and more active users hop on. Most recently, the record was broken in November with 27.1 million users. This week peaked with 27.9 million users, and most of them were playing Counter-Strike, DOTA 2, PUBG: Battlegrounds, Apex Legends and GTA V. No big surprises there - these are some of the biggest games of the last decade.
Valve is set to have a great year, on top of the success it’s already enjoying with Steam. The company’s new handheld gaming PC, the Steam Deck, is planned for launch in 2022 after suffering a recent delay due to global chip shortages.
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