It’s a pleased brand-new year undoubtedly for Valve – we’re just a few days into 2021, but the business has actually when again broken its own record for the highest number of concurrent users on its digital PC platform, Steam.
This is the seventh time the record has actually been broken in 12 months, most just recently when it hit 24,776,635 concurrent users in mid-December. Before then, the greatest concurrent player count seen on Steam was 22 million users.
Only speculation, it’s thought a combination of the colder weather condition, pandemic lockdowns, and the release of Cyberpunk 2077 have all had an impact on the figures and of course, not all 25 million were actively playing – most accounts were idle at the time, with “just” 7.4 million actively in-game at the time the record was broken.
The record of 18.5 million concurrent gamers – which was originally set at the height of PUBG’s popularity in January 2018 – has been broken a number of times given that the start of the coronavirus pandemic. On 2nd February a new high of 18.8 m was set when China entered into lockdown around Chinese New Year, and after that again just a week later, when 19.1 m were online when CNY was extended.When Europe went into lockdown in March, Steam noted another brand-new record when 20.3 m of us were online on 15th March. On the 20th this was beaten again – 21.1 countless us were all online at the very same time – and then that record was topped as soon as again on 21st March 2020.