Steam had more than 18.8m concurrent users yesterday (Sunday, February 2nd 2020).
That's according to the tracker for Valve's platform, Steam Database, which revealed the milestone on Twitter (below), saying that this is around 300,000 users higher than the previous record of 18.5m people which was reached on January 6th, 2018.
That figure was caused by battle royale behemoth Playerunknown's Battlegrounds, which launched from Early Access with a full 1.0 release in December 2017.
SteamDB points out that the number of concurrent players actually in-game has dropped, with around 5.9m people playing when the concurrent user milestone was reached. That's a drop of more than one million from the seven million people playing when the simultaneous user figure reached an all-time high at the start of 2018.
The fact that Steam continues to be hugely popular with users from China is no doubt on source of this huge milestone on Valve's platform. That's on top of games such as Destiny 2 moving to Steam from Battle.net. When that project was released on Valve's storefront, there were reports that 51 per cent of its user base was playing on PC. Before Activision and Bungie parted ways over the game, it boasted around six million monthly active users.
.@Steam has broken its record for most concurrently online users that was held for two years. Previous record was 18,537,490 users. It's still increasing!
— Steam Database (@SteamDB) February 2, 2020
But there's about 1 million less players actually in-game (≈5.8mil vs ≈7mil two years ago).https://t.co/D6WDHbz0B4
