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.