Valve is doing well. Over the weekend, Steam surpassed the momentous milestone of 10 million concurrent in-game players—the most the distribution network has ever seen at one time.
SteamDB, a third-party Twitter bot that tracks and broadcasts Steam statistics, announced the event on Saturday at 9 a.m. EST, just as gamers began their long weekend sessions. At the moment, there were 10,080,827 players in-game and 32,186,301 users on the platform. The next morning, Steam’s in-game player count peaked at 10,284,568. With 1 million concurrent players, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive was the most popular game at the time.
These figures represent a significant increase from 2019, when Steam’s concurrent in-game player count remained stable at roughly 6 million. Unsurprisingly, COVID-19 increased these figures: As more people found themselves stranded at home, they turned to gaming for entertainment and companionship. Steam has reached 8,171,592 concurrent in-game users on March 30, 2020, less than three weeks after the World Health Organization proclaimed COVID-19 a pandemic. This figure grew steadily throughout the months, eventually hitting 9 million for the first time in February 2022.
Steam’s expansion could indicate that the PC gaming scene is recovering. For the same reasons indicated above, demand for crucial computer parts increased in 2020, resulting in GPU and CPU material shortages that lasted a solid two years. PCs finally caught their breath in the spring of 2022, and while our friends at PCMag correctly pointed out why this can be problematic, it does mean that parts and entire PCs have become more affordable. As a result, players can now obtain the hardware required to plunge into their unplayed library.
However, we must not forget that the launch of the Steam Deck is likely to have contributed to Steam’s record statistics. Valve sold one million Steam Decks just eight months after they were released, at a time when the consoles were in short supply. They’ve since become much easier to obtain, with no reservations required, so it’s almost a given that the majority of Steam’s active users this weekend weren’t using a traditional PC at all.
