Entertainment News: Steam hits new all-time high of 10 million concurrent in-game players

^{Image: Valve}

This week saw a record number of players logging into Steam.

A lot of people are on Steam right now. According to SteamDB, Valve’s gaming platform saw 10,284,568 concurrent players in-game for the first time ever this week. This is a new record for the platform, with 10 million gamers actively playing games while a total of 33,078,963 users remained online.

This happened over the weekend, which should come as no surprise since that’s when most gamers would have been at home on their computers, instead of working or going to school. The platform, however, has never seen such massive numbers in its history, and it is curious that it breaks this record now and not during the winter holiday season.

Steam as a platform is rapidly gaining popularity since the COVID-19 pandemic led to a massive gaming boom in 2020, with more people self-isolating and having time for themselves than ever before. . In February 2020, Steam’s number of concurrent users hit a new high of around 18 million, a number the platform has nearly doubled in the years since.

In January 2022 for example, Steam reached a huge 29.1 million total concurrent users. That record has now been well and truly broken with over 33 million users logging into Steam just yesterday. There’s really no rhyme or reason to any of this – no big game releases that we can point our fingers at and say, “Aha! No wonder everyone tuned in last weekend! Browsing through the most played games of the day, you’ll mostly find household names in Counter-Strike: GO, DOTA 2, PUBG, Apex Legends, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

A new game came in third place, however, and that’s the social deduction game Goose Goose Duck. In this Among Us-like game, players work together to discover which of them is secretly an evil duck in disguise. The game has risen to the top of the Steam charts in recent weeks, mostly due to its popularity in China and a BTS member randomly playing the game during a livestream.