Steam has once again hit a new record for the number of players simultaneously using the service.

As spotted by Niko Partners' Daniel Ahmad, the platform hit a new peak on Friday, December 12th – clocking in at a cool 24.78 million concurrent users – but Valve's own stats show that the service has hit a new record of 24,805,106 players logged in at the same time since.

This is the first time that Steam's concurrent player figures have budged in a big way since April, when the platform hit 24.5 million users at once. This was the latest in a growth in popularity for Valve's service, driven by the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. SteamDB's Pavel Djundik has pointed out that since this point, peaks and troughs in users on the platform have all but disappeared. 

To put this growth into perspective, in January 2020 the record for Steam simultaneous users was "just" 18.8 million. The last time it grew before that was the 18.5 million users the platform saw at the start of 2018, likely due to the success of Playerunknown's Battlegrounds, which had launched out of Early Access the previous month.

This most recent increase is likely the result of a combination of factors; CD Projekt's recently-released Cyberpunk 2077 boasted one million concurrent players within hours of its December 10th launch. Meanwhile, Valve's own Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is likely behind a lot of players on Steam thanks to its newly-released Operation Broken Fang DLC.