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Steam breaks simultaneous active player record

Steam breaks simultaneous active player record

Another week, another record broken by Valve's Steam platform.

This time the service saw a new all-time high for users active in-game, according to Steam DB as spotted by VGC. 7.25m people were playing a game on Steam on Sunday, March 29th, beating the previous record of 7.2m which was set back in January 2018.

Valve's platform also broken its concurrent user record once again for the third week on the trot. Steam saw 23.4m active users, beating the 22.7m that came to the service the weekend before. That record itself was set just seven days after Steam hit 20.3m simultaneous users.

This surge in popularity is no doubt due to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic that is sweeping the world with governments advising or straight-up telling their citizens to stay indoors in order to slow the spread of the virus.

Many games companies have moved to working from home while countless events around the world have been cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The World Health Organisation has said that video games are a healthy means of staying active during self-isolation, with the body teaming up with companies from the industry for the #PlayApartTogether campaign to get players to follow health and safety advice.


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.