Steam has set a record after hitting its highest player-count ever

News by Emily Gera Contributor

Published on Feb. 2, 2020

Steam has just broken its own record for number of concurrent users this Sunday.

The PC gaming platform experienced a peak of 18,801,944 players at around 6:20am PST, according to SteamDB, breaking its previously record of 18,537,490 set on January 14, 2018.

.@Steam has broken its record for most concurrently online users that was held for two years. Previous record was 18,537,490 users. It's still increasing!

But there's about 1 million less players actually in-game (≈5.8mil vs ≈7mil two years ago).https://t.co/D6WDHbz0B4
— SteamDB (@SteamDB) February 2, 2020

Strangely though, of all those millions of Steam users online today there were actually fewer players in-game than there were last January. Today's peak saw 5,956,978 players in-game, compared to statistics from January 2018 showing more than seven million users in-game.

"Steam has broken its record for most concurrently online users that was held for two years. Previous record was 18,537,490 users. It's still increasing!" SteamDB tweeted out today. "But there's about 1 million less players actually in-game (≈5.8mil vs ≈7mil two years ago)."

So what's the reason for the uptick in concurrent users? That isn't exactly clear, but it has been a long time coming. In April, Steam officially hit one billion accounts and 90 million active users per month. This even followed Valve's banning of over 600,000 Steam accounts at the end of 2018 - a record number of bans on the platform.