Over 30 million people around the world were logged into Steam at the same time yesterday.

That's according to SteamDB, which reports that 30,032,005 – to be precise – were using Valve's PC games platform simultaneously on Sunday, October 23rd. This milestone was reached at 14:00 UTC.

Of that 30 million-plus figure, 8,504,647 users were actually in a game at the time.

At the time this record was broken, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive was the highest-played game on the platform, bringing in a record of 1.05 million concurrent players. Second place went to another Valve title, DOTA 2, which peaked at 752,713 simultaneous users, ahead of PUBG: Battlegrounds with 442,148 players.

This new milestone is around two million more players than the 28 million simultaneous users that Steam attracted in January of this year. This is part of an upwards trend for Valve's platform; until mid-2017, growth had been reasonably slow, but this changed and the number of people using Steam worldwide started to increase considerably.

This change has been accelerated by the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, which saw the number of people using Steam go through the roof. For context, at the end of 2019 – so before the coronavirus had been publicised and well before the WHO declared it to be a pandemic – the record for Steam concurrent players was around 18 million.