It’s another month, and you know what that means – another Steam concurrent players record. Today, February 7, Valve’s platform managed a rather huge 26 million users at once.
The number comes courtesy of SteamDB, where you can see that an absolutely ridiculous 26,392,063 have been on the store simultaneously. At time of writing, this number is current and holding, and it shatters the previous record, from the start of January, of just over 25 million concurrent users. Steam’s userbase continues to expand, and there’s a few reasons why.
The obvious is the ongoing lockdowns, where many people are stuck at home for long stretches. This has no doubt contributed to the rise in popularity of certain games, like Rust, the survival game that’s enjoying renewed popularity at the moment, thanks to some Twitch streamers last December. Over 150,000 are playing right now, and it’s routinely peaking over 200,000. Chinese games, and Chinese players, is another factor. Tale of Immortal, a Chinese RPG game, was an instant hit upon enter Early Access last week. Only available in Simplified Chinese, it serves as an indicator of just how many eager users Steam has in the country.
Of course, there’s no denying the power of Steam’s regulars, like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, sitting at over one million players, and Dota 2, holding form with over 600,000 players, and Apex Legends. The battle royale game from Respawn Entertainment moved onto Valve’s store late last year, and is now drawing in over 180,000 combatants when the going is good.
Steam continues shattering its concurrent users records, right now at 26.3 million users! 🚀
Previous record was 25.4mil on January 2nd. https://t.co/D6WDHbz0B4 pic.twitter.com/DSLzDfECPE
— Steam Database (@SteamDB) February 7, 2021
Given that Steam China’s going public next month, this record might be broken again before too long. Total War: Warhammer 3 has maintained the top of the Steam charts in China since going up for pre-order this week, so expect that to play a part when it’s out.
Bonus: Use SteamID finder to lookup a user’s Steam hex ID or SteamID64.