Steam keeps breaking concurrent-user records as new games arrive

[midian182]

What just happened? There's been a slew of great new titles landing on Steam recently, and that's good news not only for gamers, but also for Valve. The platform has broken its concurrent user record four times over the last month, peaking yesterday when 38,367,277 people were logged into Steam simultaneously.

Steam's run began on August 25 when the runaway success of Black Myth: Wukong helped attract 37.2 million concurrent users. Note that this covers people who were logged in at the same time – not all of them were playing games.

As shown by SteamDB, that record only lasted until September 8, when 37.6 million people were using Steam. One week later, the figure hit 37.7 million, only to be broken another week later when 38.3 million concurrent users were logged in.

Interestingly, the in-game concurrent record – the number of people playing games on Steam simultaneously – has remained unbroken since it hit 12.5 million on August 25. That's likely due to the huge number of players who enjoyed Black Myth: Wukong at launch.

Also read: Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 GPU Benchmark

Several highly-anticipated new games have arrived on Steam recently, helping break player records on multiple occasions. Black Myth was the biggest attraction, having broken Steam's concurrent record for a single-player game within hours of its release. It's also been reported that around 80% of the game's players are from China.

More recently, the excellent Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 has reached a peak of 225,690 players. It's possible that a recent endorsement on Instagram from Warhammer megafan Henry Cavill, who is starring in and producing a Warhammer show on Amazon, will further boost player numbers.

 

 

 

 

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A post shared by Henry Cavill (@henrycavill)

Other recent releases riding high in the Steam charts include God of War: Ragnarök, despite it being review bombed over Sony requiring a PSN account to play the game. There's also the grim city-builder Frostpunk 2, as well as discounts on favorites such as Crusader Kings III, Cyberpunk 2077, and Total War: Warhammer III.

With the holidays approaching, more new games on the way, and Steam's massive seasonal sales to look forward to, expect the concurrent record to be broken several more times before the year is out. Will we finally see it hit 50 million in 2025?

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Steam keeps breaking concurrent-user records as new games arrive

 

[toooooot]

Steam should lower the fee for small game makers.
But they would more likely lower it for the biggest studios and keep unchanged
for indi game makers.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

Steam should lower the fee for small game makers.
But they would more likely lower it for the biggest studios and keep unchanged
for indi game makers.

Why should they? They are successful and have a huge customer base.

 

[ThomasTECH]

Steam is picking up Steam! I am on it, and it is impressive and in some cases works cross platform with other consoles including sony playstation. It does have the potential to ruin your life via addictive gaming.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Yeah, it looks like Steam is starting to hit a digital distribution singularity (monopoly?) on the PC.

First it was an unchallenged trilblazer, then it was challenged and lost a ton of content to the likes of EA leaving for their own digital distribution services and Epic doing their exclusivity tomfoolery, then it beat those odds and has EA and most of the publisher's crawling back and Epic dropping their exclusivity program more or less entirely.

The people have spoken, looks like Steam will reign supreme until some other sea change completely remakes the gaming distribution landscape.

 

[kiwigraeme]

Yeah, it looks like Steam is starting to hit a digital distribution singularity (monopoly?) on the PC.

First it was an unchallenged trilblazer, then it was challenged and lost a ton of content to the likes of EA leaving for their own digital distribution services and Epic doing their exclusivity tomfoolery, then it beat those odds and has EA and most of the publisher's crawling back and Epic dropping their exclusivity program more or less entirely.

The people have spoken, looks like Steam will reign supreme until some other sea change completely remakes the gaming distribution landscape.

You can use gog galaxy to show most of your games , stop rebuying freebie on Epic etc

But it mostly works and is so convenient, people just need to know how to fix a game save stuff up between local and cloud

 

[Felusy]

Yeah, it looks like Steam is starting to hit a digital distribution singularity (monopoly?) on the PC.

First it was an unchallenged trilblazer, then it was challenged and lost a ton of content to the likes of EA leaving for their own digital distribution services and Epic doing their exclusivity tomfoolery, then it beat those odds and has EA and most of the publisher's crawling back and Epic dropping their exclusivity program more or less entirely.

The people have spoken, looks like Steam will reign supreme until some other sea change completely remakes the gaming distribution landscape.

No they don't - Epic Games has more users than ever and the only true Steam rival.

Epic gives away free games constantly and their games are always cheaper than Steam. Tons of games have Epic/Steam exclusivity tho. At least in the first 12 months.

 

[Puiu]

No they don't - Epic Games has more users than ever and the only true Steam rival.

Epic gives away free games constantly and their games are always cheaper than Steam. Tons of games have Epic/Steam exclusivity tho. At least in the first 12 months.

Epic is just cancer for the PC gaming community. It's not a steam competitor, it's just a store that is eating away at the smaller stores like GOG with third party exclusivity deals and destroying the market. It's simultaneously using anti-competitive and anti-consumer practices.

Epic is doing exactly what Amazon has done because of it's deep pockets: sell at a loss to destroy the competition. It's only a matter of time before they get sued just like Amazon did.

 

[Puiu]

Steam should lower the fee for small game makers.
But they would more likely lower it for the biggest studios and keep unchanged
for indi game makers.

That's what steam keys are for.

 

[Burty117]

No they don't - Epic Games has more users than ever and the only true Steam rival.

Again, just a quick Google search:
Epic Store daily users: 36 million
Steam Store user count: 69 million

Honestly, that Epic Store figure sounds wildly high as well, I guess giving games away for free worked to some extent.

Considering how much of a loss making part of Epic’s business the store has been so far, I’m surprised they’re still giving away free games.

 

[Felusy]

That's what steam keys are for.

Steam still grabs 30% regardless

Buying keys just means the actual developers gets even less

 

[Felusy]

Again, just a quick Google search:
Epic Store daily users: 36 million
Steam Store user count: 69 million

Honestly, that Epic Store figure sounds wildly high as well, I guess giving games away for free worked to some extent.

Considering how much of a loss making part of Epic’s business the store has been so far, I’m surprised they’re still giving away free games.

Epic Games does fine, and tons of people use their launcher daily
Many people will buy games on Epic when its cheaper than Steam, it is as simple as that

Epic is Steams biggest rival and they are eating more and more users, so yeah giving away games for free worked like a charm - Steam never does this, they only want to milk

The reason we never saw HL3 is because milking other devs is easier

Steam lacks tons of PC games, which is why SteamOS failed - They went for monopoly, and failed. Glad they failed.

 

[Burty117]

Steam lacks tons of PC games…

You confirmed in another comment section, your version of “tons of games” is a single game, Alan Wake 2.

It’s very hard to take you seriously when you keep using such extreme wording.
Tons would normally mean at least hundreds of games, not (at most) 20-30 games of which, you only want to talk about Alan Wake 2.

Edit: Had to add, Epic Games Store is not doing “fine” it has never made a profit, not a single dime of profit, they have only ever lost money every second it’s been operating.

 

[Puiu]

Steam still grabs 30% regardless

Buying keys just means the actual developers gets even less

Steam keys are free. You don't pay 30% if you sell them and you also don't pay to generate them. Only sales inside the steam platform have the 30% transaction tax.

Steam Keys (Steamworks Documentation)

partner.steamgames.com

an TL;DR from the TOS:

• It is important that you don't give Steam customers a worse deal.
• It's ok to run a discount on different stores at different times as long as you plan to give a - "comparable offer" to Steam customers within a reasonable amount of time.
• Steam keys shouldn't be given away for free or shouldn't be sold in bulk.
• While there is no fee to generate keys on Steam, we ask that partners use the service judiciously (with Sense).

 

[Puiu]

You confirmed in another comment section, your version of “tons of games” is a single game, Alan Wake 2.

It’s very hard to take you seriously when you keep using such extreme wording.
Tons would normally mean at least hundreds of games, not (at most) 20-30 games of which, you only want to talk about Alan Wake 2.

Edit: Had to add, Epic Games Store is not doing “fine” it has never made a profit, not a single dime of profit, they have only ever lost money every second it’s been operating.

And to make matters worse, Alan Wake 2 failed because it was limited to EGS

At least with this one it was funded by them, not just bought at the end of development. But it still shows that EGS is not a good place if you want your game to sell well. People use it just because of fortnite and free games.

 

[Watzupken]

I don't see the purpose of this concurrent Steam login metric. Its meaningless. They want maximum users, just release a popular game at a low or no price that is limited to 12 hours. You should see the record easily broken, but again, what's the point? Epic sees a lot of traffic when they offer free games, but I don't think it translates to a meaningful increase in sale.

 

[alexnode]

I think that gamepass and epic have an impact on steam... maybe it's just me but I played a lot of games this year from game pass and epic. The worry about steam is also their strength, there are a lot of awful games on the platform, and every now and then you get an amazing indy.

 

[Felusy]

I think that gamepass and epic have an impact on steam... maybe it's just me but I played a lot of games this year from game pass and epic. The worry about steam is also their strength, there are a lot of awful games on the platform, and every now and then you get an amazing indy.

Tons of people did, they are simply living in denial. Who cares tho.

Its not like I hate Steam, I use it more than Epic by far, however, only a fool asks for monopoly.

SteamOS failed due to tons of PC games missing. Very few people is going to run "SteamOS" when you can't play all PC games. It is as simple as that.

Also, most Steam games run horrible on SteamOS. Crashes, wonky performance, just tons of issues.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

No they don't - Epic Games has more users than ever and the only true Steam rival.

Epic gives away free games constantly and their games are always cheaper than Steam. Tons of games have Epic/Steam exclusivity tho. At least in the first 12 months.

-You can both have more users than ever and a smaller share of the overall pie at the same time.

Whatever Epic was trying to do with their free games and exclusives clearly hasn't worked, and essentially any game that launches on Epic exclusively falls down a black hole until it relaunches on Steam and actually makes money.

 

[Puiu]

I don't see the purpose of this concurrent Steam login metric. Its meaningless. They want maximum users, just release a popular game at a low or no price that is limited to 12 hours. You should see the record easily broken, but again, what's the point? Epic sees a lot of traffic when they offer free games, but I don't think it translates to a meaningful increase in sale.

The point is that I shows constant growth which is what most developers who publish on steam want to see.