Valve’s digital distribution platform continues to gain in usage and popularity.
As spotted by games industry analyst Daniel Ahmad, Steam attracted over 28 million concurrent users today, a new record for the service. It was just earlier this month that Steam was in the news for passing 25 million concurrent users, but its growth appears to be rising more quickly than anyone might’ve anticipated.
Steam hit 28 million concurrent users today.
— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) January 9, 2022
Concurrent users saw strong growth during 2020, due to the impact of COVID-19, but it's clear that growth also continued to persist in 2021.
Peaks reached each Jan:
Jan 2019: 17.6m
Jan 2020: 18.3m
Jan 2021: 25.4m
Jan 2022: 28.2m https://t.co/iBRLqLGqAw
“Steam hit 28 million concurrent users today,” confirmed Ahmad based off of data retrieved from SteamDB, a comprehensive, third-party database of everything on Steam.
“Concurrent users saw strong growth during 2020, due to the impact of COVID-19, but it’s clear that growth also continued to persist in 2021.”
According to Steam’s official game stats page at the time of this posting, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is the most popular game on the service right now, having attracted over 880,000 players today. The iconic team-based action gameplay shooter is followed by Dota 2, one of the world’s most recognizable MOBAs, which saw a peak of over 740,000 players today. Valve was involved in the development of both titles.
Source: SteamDB (via Daniel Ahmad)