Steam broke its own concurrent record once again when 22m of us were online yesterday
"Global lockdowns and self-isolation due to COVID-19 has led to at-home gaming becoming a safe form of entertainment."
Another weekend, another unprecedented number of players concurrently online on Steam. This time, a reported 22 million of us were online yesterday, breaking the latest record only set Friday.
"Steam just achieved a new peak concurrent user record of 22 million, one day after reaching 21 million and six days after reaching 20 million," tweeted industry analyst, Daniel Ahmad. "Global lockdowns and self-isolation due to COVID-19 has led to at-home gaming becoming a safe form of entertainment to pass the time."
As Ahmad reports, the record of 18.5 million concurrent players - which was originally set at the height of PUBG popularity in January 2018 - has been broken several times since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. On 2nd February a new high of 18.8m was set when China went into lockdown around Chinese New Year, and then again just a week later, when 19.1m were online when CNY was extended.
When Europe went into lockdown earlier this month, Steam recorded another new record when 20.3m of us were online on 15th March. On the 20th this was beaten once more - 21.1 million of us were online at the same time. And now that record has been topped once again.
Valve's eight-year-old first-person shooter Counter-Strike: Global Offensive also hit an incredible peak of 1,002,031 players last week, topping one million concurrent players for the very first time.
CS:GO's popularity has been on the rise for some time now, and has broken its all-time peak concurrents figure a number of times in recent months. As Wesley reported at the time, that makes it the most-popular game on Steam by some distance. Valve's MOBA, Dota 2, was the second-most popular game on Steam, with a peak of 685,879 players. Battle royale PUBG was third with 525,462 players.