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Steam hits new record of 18.5m concurrent users

Steam hits new record of 18.5m concurrent users

Steam has hit a new concurrent player figure record with 18.5m people on the platform at one time late last week.

Word comes by way of SteamDB, which records the exact figure as 18,522,222 users. Of that figure, roughly seven million people were actually in-game at the time.

Valve revealed at Casual Connects in August last year that its peak concurrent user figure was 14m. That grew to 17.5m in November during the Autumn Sale.

As always, it would seem that Playerunknown's Battelgrounds is partly to blame for this. Checking the data for battle royale game, more than three million people were playing that title when Steam hit its new peak.

As an aside, this also shows that just under half of people in a game on Saturday January 6th were playing Playerunknown's Battlegrounds.

The 1.0 release of the game saw Steam's total bandwidth increase by four times.


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.