Featured Image Credit: Valve
So, what’s your New Year’s resolution? If it’s to play more video games, apparently you wouldn’t be alone, as Steam has started the year with a bang, by setting a new record for its number of concurrent users, coming in just below 28 million.
To be precise, the exact number was 27,942,036, and was set on 2 January, according to SteamDB. At the time, 8.2 million of those were actively gaming, presumably (and understandably) cramming it in before the return to work. This basically comes only a month after the last record, as it previously broke 27 million users for the first time back in November. Guess a lot of people wanted to make the most of their Christmas break?
Just in case you lost track of time, the Steam Deck is actually releasing next month - check out the video below.
Steam’s numbers have been growing constantly basically since forever, as you’d expect, and saw a huge spike in March 2020 for reasons I’m sure I don’t need to explain. Gotta love having some indoor hobbies to fall back on when no one can go outside! But it does go to show that even though its competitors are also growing in size themselves (looking at you, Epic Games Store), none are really coming close to beating Steam in the numbers game.
Funnily enough though, this new spike in users doesn’t seem to be the result of any new releases drawing people in. The top ten games being played when the record was set only saw two 2021 releases, New World and Football Manager 2022, make the list at all. Others included GTA V (which was last year’s most viewed game on Twitch, too), CS:GO, TF2, and Apex Legends, none of which should really be surprising.
With the Steam Deck set to make its way out into the world in February this year (I’m just now realising that’s next month, help), there’s no doubt that that record is set to be broken again, and fast - while the 28 million mark may have been narrowly missed, it’s only a matter of time.
