Steam continues to be one of the most popular PC gaming platforms available, having an incredible lineup that includes some of the best games available. Its growth has been propelling even further since the start of 2020 due to the on-going COVID-19 pandemic. This can be seen in the past few years, where Steam broke its concurrent player count in 2021 many times over the course of a few months. While 2021's growth persisted, the new year shows that this growth is still on-going, with a new player count record being set.
2022 started with a new concurrent player record for Steam, reaching nearly 28 million users all at once. More specifically, this peak was last week, where eactly 27,942,458 users were all active at once. This broke the previous record of 27.4 million back in November 2021 by over 500,000 users. Some may have thought that this achievement couldn't be replicated again, or at least not for a few months, but it has been reported that this record has already been broken once more.
SteamDB is a database site for Valve's platform client, providing analytics and other important information regarding its games, storefront, and more. This includes charts regarding the number of users currently on Steam at one time, where today at around 9 AM ET, it managed to cross the 28 million player mark. More specifically, it reached 28,230,661 concurrent users, which is nearly 300 thousand more users than its previous record. This record being broken within just one week is quite surprising.
Industry analyst Daniel Ahmad observed that Steam has seen plenty of growth since the pandemic started, and it has continued to increase since then. This count also seems to have been bolstered by the platform's library, as evidenced by some of the best-selling and most-popular games on Steam in 2021. This includes games that consistenly have topped the charts such as Grand Theft Auto 5, Counter-Strike Global Offensive, and New World.
Valve's Steam platform has continued to thrive in the past few years, as more and more people get into PC Gaming. While there are tons of new AAA releases that players can pick up through the client, there's also many old games that are still being played on Steam, keeping players invested. All of these factors and more explain how Steam was able to break its concurrent player record in such a short time, and it's only going to continue growing from there.