Steam has broken its record of its 18.5 million concurrent users. Steam has reached above 18.8 million concurrent users and recorded a staggering 18,801,944 users as its all-time player peak. The previous record was 18.5 million users, which was recorded two years ago. Even though Steam broke its concurrent user record, there were 5.8 concurrent players in games. It is quite less as compared to the older record as in 2018, there were 7 million players in-game when they reached the old record of 18.5 million users.
@Steam has broken its record for most concurrently online users that was held for two years. Previous record was 18,537,490 users. It’s still increasing!
But there’s about 1 million less players actually in-game (≈5.8mil vs ≈7mil two years ago).https://t.co/D6WDHbz0B4
— Steam Database (@SteamDB) February 2, 2020
There is still no explanation for what brought the rise of concurrent users this year. In 2018, PlayersUnknown Battlegrounds boomed in the gaming space, which pushed the number of concurrent users at that time. Many cases might have caused the rise like Counter-Strike Global Offensive Scattered-Web, etc. There isn’t much concrete evidence regarding the increase of concurrent users, but that is an improved audience number for Valve and their company. The number might rise after the launch of the Half-Life Sequel: Half-Life Alyx.
Valve started as a game development company with the release of their Half-Life, Portal, etc. but moved as digital game vendors with its release of Steam. Steam had significant changes in 2019, overhaul in the UI and Client, changes in community markets systems. Steam has tons of competition on the market with Origin, Uplay, and Epic Store, as every store wants to grab all the users and shares of games from Steam. But Valve is currently working to roll out tons of features like remote play, expanding their platform to Chromebook, etc. Several other companies are trying to grasp Valve out of the top. Still, after all the years of trust and reliability, Steam is still on the top of the gaming distribution ecosystem.
