Steam breaks its record for concurrent users, at nearly 25m

Steam has once again broken its own record for the highest number of concurrent users ever recorded on the platform – The sixth time this year it has done so, this time with 24.8 million registered.

PC Gamer first spotted data from SteamDB, showing that Valve’s platform hit an all time high of 24,776,635 over the weekend. Since then, however, SteamDB recorded 24,804,148 concurrent users, showing that Steam broke its record twice in just a couple of days.

Steam, much like the rest of the industry, has seen a surge of interest since the COVID-19 outbreak. When the first lockdown kicked in, millions flocked to the platform, creating the previous record of 22 million concurrent users in March 2020.

While the pandemic has certainly boosted these numbers, Steam was on an upwards trend anyway – Prior to breaking the concurrent users record in March, it had broken the previous record in February, with 18,801,944 concurrent users.

Also most likely helping to boost this weekend’s numbers is the release of Cyberpunk 2077 – Which, while suffering from some performance issues, has sold tremendously well. A day after the game’s release on December 10th, it was reported that it had already recouped its development costs.