Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Steam has seen its concurrent user record broken time and time again. Over the Thanksgiving weekend (late November) 2021, the peak was 27.3 million and a few months later that number hit 28 million.
Since then, the number of concurrent players, that is, the number of people using the service at any given time, has fluctuated between these two figures, but last Sunday, October 23, marked the first time that the platform crosses the 30 million mark.
What are the most popular games of this record weekend?
As revealed by SteamDB, 30,032,005 players were online on Sunday, October 23. Steam numbers have been on the rise for a long time, but since 2020, the start of the coronavirus pandemic, the growth has been exponential. For comparison, PC Gamer found that it took 14 years for Steam to peak at 15 million concurrent users in 2017, but only 5 years for the next 15 million.
The top five most played games during this weekend's spike are Counter-Strike: Global Offensive , DOTA 2 , Lost Ark , Apex Legends , and PUBG .
CS:GO has amassed over 1 million registered users online, peaking at 1.05 million players on Sunday the 23rd . However, it should be noted that registered users in the 30 million Steam users weren't necessarily in play, as this figure also includes users browsing stores or chatting with friends on the platform's chat.
Thank you Steam Deck?
The release of Valve's console, the Steam Deck , has probably greatly helped the democratization of the video game platform. If the majority of people who have purchased the portable console are potentially already Steam users, newcomers will certainly land on the client with the end of the year holidays coming up and the Steam Decks that will be under the tree.
Additionally, Steam's upcoming fall (Nov 22-29) and winter (Dec 22-Jan 5) sales will no doubt attract even more players to the platform.
For Shuppet featured hour this October 25, we were supposed to have a nice surprise on Pokémon GO: beautiful Zorua to capture for the first time on the mobile game. Unfortunately, Niantic has retraced its steps...
