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Steam hits new record of 27.4m concurrent users

Steam hits new record of 27.4m concurrent users

PC games platform Steam has once again hit a new record for concurrent users on its service.

As reported by SteamDB, this new feat was managed on Sunday, November 28th at 14:00 GMT, and will no doubt have been helped by the fact that the Steam Autumn Sale is currently being held. A contributing factor will also be that a lot of Americans will have been in holiday mode due to it being Thanksgiving weekend.

Steam has been attracting more and more concurrent users in recent years; at the start of 2020, the record for simultaneous users was 18.8 million. By April of that year, this had soared to 24.5 million thanks to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, reaching 24.8 million users in December. That was helped by the launch of Cyberpunk 2077 and the Operation Broken Fang DLC for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

By the beginning of 2021, Steam reached a new peak of 25.4 million, meaning there's been a two million concurrent user increase in the last eleven months.

SteamDB's Pavel Djundik had pointed out that since April, peaks and troughs in the number of users on Steam – normally seen at weekends and in the evenings – have all but disappeared. Again, this will no doubt be due to a certain global pandemic that has seen people stuck at home and looking for a way to entertain themselves.


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.