Steam just broke its own concurrent users record again
Yesterday's peak of 24,776,635 concurrent users is a new all-time record.
For the sixth time this year, Steam has broken its own record for the highest number of concurrent players ever recorded on Steam.
Steam saw an unprecedented number of players concurrently online back when the pandemic first surged, resulting in millions of people going into lockdown. Before today, the highest concurrent player count seen on Steam was 22 million users.
Now, according to SteamDB (thanks, PC Gamer), Valve's PC platform has hit another record high, with 24,776,635 concurrent users on the service yesterday.
At the time of writing, that figure has dropped to 22.6m, although that's still higher than the most recent record of 22 million. Though only speculation, it's thought a combination of the cold weather, pandemic lockdowns, and the release of Cyberpunk 2077 have all had an impact on the figures.
The record of 18.5 million concurrent players - which was originally set at the height of PUBG's 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 in March, Steam noted 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 all online at the same time - and then that record was topped once again on 21st March 2020.
