Steam had 10M people playing at the same time this week

Steam has been on a roll over the past couple of years. This time last year the platform reached 28 million concurrent users, an increase of three million over the year before. Over this past weekend, SteamDB recorded that number rocketing up to a new peak of 33,078,963 players all logged into Steam at the same time.

A four million concurrent user increase over 12 months is some damn good growth, and it's not the only record that Valve's platform smashed over the weekend. While the 33 million concurrent users is just for the number of players logged into Steam, Eurogamer reports that there were also 10,284,586 people actively playing something on January 8. It's the first time the platform has surpassed 10 million concurrent active users.

Regulars like CS:GO, Apex Legends, Dota 2 and Grand Theft Auto 5 once again topped the charts for what people were playing during the platform's peak. But there's also some games we didn't see this time last year dominating the top spots. Amazon's MMO Lost Ark was in the top 10 games for January 9, along with Wallpaper Engine. The most surprising entry is Among Us-like Goose Goose Duck. The game's been out since October 2021, but has exploded in popularity over the last month or two in a surprisingly similar fashion to the game it was inspired by (albeit helped by K-pop). It even managed to surpass Among Us' concurrent player record at the beginning of the year.

I wonder if the difference between last 2021 and 2022's growth has anything to do with the Steam Deck shipping into hands all over in the past 12 months. Especially with the holiday season behind us and many more people inevitably in possession of Valve's handheld, it makes sense to see the concurrents as high as they are right now. Steam Decks spent a lot of the year on backorder so, with the consoles far more readily available now, I'm sure we'll see even higher numbers in another 12 months.