Steam breaks its own record with 10 million concurrent in-game users and 33 million active...

midian182

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What just happened? Steam is constantly setting new concurrent user records these days. Valve's platform did it again over the weekend, but this time another record was broken at the same time: the number of active players, which finally surpassed 10 million.

It was only in October that Steam first passed the 30 million concurrent users mark. The figure meant that the record had increased by 10 million in just two years. That record was broken again in November when it hit 31,379,760 and reached a new high of 33,078,963 on January 8, according to SteamDB.

The concurrent user record covers everyone logged into Steam simultaneously; the number of people actually playing games (active users) is always significantly lower. In addition to concurrent users, the weekend also saw a new record for the number of active users, reaching a massive 10,284,568.

The list of most popular games people were playing during this time contains familiar names: CS: GO, Dota 2, PUBG: Battlegrounds, Apex Legends, and GTA V, to name a few. They're joined by Goose Goose Duck, a game of social deduction where players and their fellow geese must work together to complete a mission. Yes, it's a lot like Among Us. Elsewhere, Amazon Games' free-to-play Lost Ark MMO remains popular despite recent reviews pushing its overall rating from Mostly Positive to Mixed.

Another game in the charts is Wallpaper Engine. It enables users to create, browse, and share Windows desktop wallpapers, but its popularity likely comes from its ability to evade China's ban on pornography, hence why over 200,000 of its positive reviews are written in Chinese.

With Valve's annual Steam Winter Sale recently ending, it appears that plenty of people who grabbed a few top titles at discounted prices were enjoying them over the weekend. The increase in users will partly be down to more Steam Decks getting into the hands of gamers, too, especially over the holidays. With records being broken every few months, don't expect Valve's platform to run out of steam anytime soon (sorry).

h/t: Eurogamer

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I was a gaming this past weekend on Steam, but I haven't purchased anything through Steam/Valve in the past 4 years. I was just enjoying the Batman games this past week and into the weekend. They're always entertaining for a good beatdown on bad guys.

I haven't enjoyed Counter Strike since the release of Counter Strike: Source. I played the original (1.6, as it's now known as) from the time it came out as a mod and up until the initial first year or so of Source. I guess I grew tired of the game after that and I also grew tired of the online shooter genre overall and never played anything else like that for years. Eventually a few friends got me to play PUBG when it came out and they even paid for a copy of the game because I told them I wasn't interested (since they paid for the game I kind of felt obligated to play it with them some). The game was okay in short dosses, my friends and I would usually be down to the last 10-12 players (winning and losing matches about a 50/50 rate), but once cheaters starting polluting the games I walked away and I haven't touched another online shooter game and I have no interest in them.
 
Yeah, I prefer to buy things on gog, but steam do great job with Linux and thanks to that nearly everything is playable there.
Good for them, waiting for new steam controller;)
 
They should split steam, as it has too much of a monopoly, and these days we hear of valve for its game it sells for others but not for games they make.

Gotta give credit to epic store for at least bringing the unreal engine 5 tech with lumen and all.

In the meanwhile steam/valve still have nothing for us on the half-life universe... Same as blizzard had nothing on starcraft universe. Sad times.

CS Go is still great, but is too much linked to a platform. In that game you should simply log from a .exe and not from a launcher to a platform. That's how it started.
 
I was a gaming this past weekend on Steam, but I haven't purchased anything through Steam/Valve in the past 4 years. I was just enjoying the Batman games this past week and into the weekend. They're always entertaining for a good beatdown on bad guys.

I haven't enjoyed Counter Strike since the release of Counter Strike: Source. I played the original (1.6, as it's now known as) from the time it came out as a mod and up until the initial first year or so of Source. I guess I grew tired of the game after that and I also grew tired of the online shooter genre overall and never played anything else like that for years. Eventually a few friends got me to play PUBG when it came out and they even paid for a copy of the game because I told them I wasn't interested (since they paid for the game I kind of felt obligated to play it with them some). The game was okay in short dosses, my friends and I would usually be down to the last 10-12 players (winning and losing matches about a 50/50 rate), but once cheaters starting polluting the games I walked away and I haven't touched another online shooter game and I have no interest in them.
The same. The majority of the games I've bought are from other platforms like humble or gog. It's also why I refuse to touch epic.
 
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