It appears that there is nothing stopping the PC games juggernaut that Valve built. Following an already-impressive milestone of 25.4 million peak concurrent users back in January, the digital distribution service managed to outdo itself again today with a new record of 26.4 million users. The achievement was highlighted by Steam Database, which shared a graph confirming that over 7.3 million were in-game during the peak.
“While Steam was already seeing significant growth in 2020 before COVID-19 lockdowns, video game playtime surged when people started staying home, dramatically increasing the number of customers buying and playing games, and hopefully bringing some joy to counter-balance some of the craziness that was 2020,” Valve pointed out in its 2020 Year in Review post.
“This has led to new highs for monthly active users (120.4 million), daily active users (62.6 million), peak concurrent users (24.8 million), first-time purchasers (2.6 million per month), hours of playtime (31.3 billion hours), and the number of games purchased (21.4% increase over 2019).”
That 120 million monthly active users milestone suggests that Steam is significantly more popular than Microsoft and Sony’s services. As noted in Eurogamer’s coverage, Xbox boss Phil Spencer revealed in September 2020 that Xbox Live reaches over 100 million people each month, while Sony announced in July 2020 that PlayStation Network had 103 million monthly active users.
Steam continues shattering its concurrent users records, right now at 26.3 million users! 🚀
— Steam Database (@SteamDB) February 7, 2021
Previous record was 25.4mil on January 2nd. https://t.co/D6WDHbz0B4 pic.twitter.com/DSLzDfECPE