Steam Breaks Its Concurrent User Record Again

Update: After Steam's concurrent record was set in February, it's now been broken once again, reaching 20,313,451 on Saturday, March 14. Today, March 17 saw that figure hit 19,750,357, while the 19 million mark was also surpassed on March 16; that's nearly a million more users than the February record. The trend is pointing upwards as social distancing is encouraged due to the coronavirus, and it seems possible this won't be the final time Steam's record is beaten in the near future. The original story follows.

Steam broke its own record for concurrent users online this past Sunday, surpassing the prior record of 18,537,490 users set back on January 14, 2018.

The PC gaming platform experienced a peak of 18,801,944 concurrent players on Sunday at around 6:20 AM PT/9:20 AM ET/2:20 PM GMT, according to SteamDB. Interestingly enough, however, there were actually fewer people in-game than when the previous record was set in 2018, down from seven million to 5.8 million.

What, exactly, those near-19 million users were doing at the time Steam hit its peak is difficult to ascertain. The likes of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Dota 2, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, Grand Theft Auto V, Monster Hunter: World, and Tom Clancy's Rainbox Six Siege were among the most played games at the time, but their combined player numbers only make up a fraction of the 5.8 million users in-game. Either way, the uptick in concurrent users has been coming, as Steam recently hit one billion accounts and 90 million active users per month.