Over 20 million people were using Steam last night, breaking the concurrent player record

Coronavirus. There, I said it. It’s a part of this story and now we can move on to the actual fun stuff. Maybe I’m being dismissive but there’s only so much you can read about COVID-19 before it starts becoming supremely depressing. So rather than discussing the spread of the virus, let’s rather focus on something rather fun that has resulted from the pandemic of a super flu racing across the world. One of the non-medical side effects on the coronavirus is that plenty of people have been locking themselves away from the world in a bid to self-quarantine themselves. That means that millions of people around the world are looking for new ways to keep themselves entertained and if there’s one thing I can tell you it’s that video games are a great way to alleviate boredom.

Apparently plenty of people agree with that sentiment as new data has emerged showing that Steam’s concurrent player count has broken its previous record of 19 million users just last month by adding an extra million players on top of that total. The precise number of players being 20,313,451 at its peak. While the digital marketplace/platform was absolutely flooded with players, it appears that only 6,3 million of that total were actually inside of a game at the time. Is that cheating? I guess but that’s still a very impressive number.

If those are just the numbers being pulled in from Steam, I would be very fascinated to see what totals across every platform amount to. Toss in PlayStation, Xbox, Switch and even Epic Store users and you’ll probably find that there were more people playing video games last night than ever before. What a wild time to be alive, for now.

Last Updated: March 16, 2020