Steam breaks records with 10 million concurrent in-game players

Valve’s game distribution platform Steam had a record-breaking weekend, exceeding 10 million concurrent in-game players for the first time, while also surpassing 32 million concurrent online users. According to SteamDB (a non-Valve affiliated database), Steam racked up 10,082,055 active in-game players and 32,186,301 concurrent online users — folks who were online, but not necessarily playing a game — on Saturday, January 7th, surpassing previous user milestones.

In fact, Steam has already surpassed the record for concurrent online users in the last 24 hours since SteamDB’s initial announcement on Saturday, with a new all-time peak of 33,078,963 users being reported by the database website.

Steam has increasingly broken records for concurrent online users since the beginning of 2020, coinciding with the beginning of the global Covid-19 pandemic. By March of that year, the platform had smashed its then-all-time record for concurrent users at 20,313,451, which had increased to a new record of 30 million users by March 2022.

The two most popular games aren’t too surprising: Counter-Strike: Global Offensive took the crown having achieved over 1 million concurrent players during the weekend, with DOTA 2 sitting ever-comfortably in second place. A surprising newcomer in third place, however, was the recently released Goose Goose Duck — a free-to-play multiplayer social deduction game reminiscent of Among Us (a title that saw explosive popularity during Covid lockdowns) that’s since achieved an all-time peak of 640,324 players at the time of writing.