The new year gaming weekend recorded the highest number of concurrent users. As of the morning of 2 January 2021, Steam’s all-time peak concurrent connected user count broke the 25 million mark. Precisely, it was 25,415,080 per the trackers over at SteamDB with 7.2 million active players according to PC Gamer. It’s a new high for a new year where clearly, more people than ever are playing PC games through the platform.
Steam’s upward trend began in January 2020 when Chinese nationals began to self-isolate at the start of the COVID-19 crisis. On 2 February 2020, Steam’s previous record of 18,537,490 users – set in January 2018 –was surpassed smashing the existing record by an impressive 300,000 to peak at 18,801,944 players. It’s gone on to be broken several times since, including a weekend in March 2020 which saw numbers breach 20 million for the first time, and then 22 million just a week later.
Some 8.1 million players were in-game in March, while just 7.4 million were in games today. That said, today’s goal continues the trend of Valves free-to-play games leading the way, with CS:GO reporting more than a million, per usual, while Dota 2 neared 700k and PUBG cleared 400k. Singleplayer games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Stardew Valley both contributed in the top 10 among perennially popular games like GTAV and Rust.
