Steam concurrent users break 7 million

Steam's concurrent user count grew to a whopping 7 million during the holiday weekend.

Mid-morning ET on December 1, Steam peaked at 7,190,578 concurrent users, a new record for the service.

That's up from the 6.6 million of late January, which itself represented a 300% growth acceleration over November 2012.

Dota 2 remains one of the most attractive titles on Steam, drawing a peak of 542,906 concurrent users today. The second most popular title is also a Valve production - Counter-Strike: Global Offensive with 93,905 peak concurrent users.

The Elder Scrolls V; Skyrim, Sid Meier's Civilization V and Football Manager 2013 are the next most popular, which is deeply unsurprising.

Steam's sudden jump in users may be partially explained by its holiday sale, and is in defiance of the launch of two new consoles, the PS4 and Xbox One, which might have been expected to draw users away from their PCs.

We're expecting Steam's popularity to grow with the release of Steam Machines next year - a range of living room computers running the Linux-based SteamOS and sporting the Valve-produced Steam Controller, but manufactured by various PC companies to Valve's specifications. Here's our first look at one such offering from iBuyPower.