There’s something damn impressive numbers about numbers, and Steam may have just earned themselves a rare Ron Simmons GIF with the latest figures that they posted on the weekend. Sunday may have been the busiest day ever for the digital gaming platform, as the SteamDB reported that a peak of 18,801,944 players occurred at 6:20am PST on the holiest of days:
Which as I mentioned before, is a number worthy of this:
That’s a two year record broken right there, as Steam’s highest concurrent player session was previously broken on January 14 in 2018 with 18,537,490 players. So what was everyone playing? A few surprises on this front, with old favourites dominating the top ten:
- Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
- Dota 2
- PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds
- Grand Theft Auto V
- Monster Hunter: World
- Rainbow Six Siege
- Destiny 2
- ARK: Survival Evolved
- Football Manager 2020
- Team Fortress 2
Here’s the catch: While Steam may have seen a massive spike in users at that particular point in time, the number of them actually playing games were down by a fair amount. SteamDB says that 5,956,978 players were busy jamming in Destiny 2 and Football Manager 2020 as opposed to January 2018’s spike which had seven million active players during the peak. Which probably points to a lot of bot traffic. Probably.
Even with the Epic Games Store and a whole host of other launchers taking a share of the gaming pie, Valve is still in a comfortable spot in the grand scheme of things, with their dominance likely to continue for many more years before they start nervously tugging at their collar.
Last Updated: February 3, 2020
justlikemo
February 3, 2020 at 08:07
think its a case of people trolling the app, downloading their updates, check what’s new in store, greenlight, etc. Or just running while their PC’s are on.
HairyEwok
February 3, 2020 at 08:37
At this point most Steam users have their Steam to autostart on startup. So most of those users are probably not aware that their Steam is running until that friendslist fires up and tells you Piet is playing CS:GO
Quentin Huggett
February 3, 2020 at 18:38
that stat is users playing games, not users logged into steam
HairyEwok
February 4, 2020 at 08:56
I’m not sure if you saw the SteamDB twitter post, but they say it’s a record for most concurrent online users, and that the total actually in-game is down by about 1 million.
HairyEwok
February 4, 2020 at 08:56
I’m not sure if you saw the SteamDB twitter post, but they say it’s a record for most concurrent online users, and that the total actually in-game is down by about 1 million.