Steam has a record-breaking 20 million concurrent users as coronavirus keeps people home

(Image credit: Jon Bolding)

One of the knock-on effects of people working from home and practicing social isolation as coronavirus spreads is that more people than ever are using Valve's digital gaming platform. A record-breaking 20 million concurrent users as counted by SteamDB—20,313,451 to be precise, with 6.2 million of those people in-game.

A month ago we were all being very impressed when Steam hit 19 million concurrents, to put that number in perspective. And as for the 6.2 million in game, there were almost a million more players in-game back on New Year's Day 2018 when PUBG was the shiny new thing. At the moment CS:GO is the game at the top of the Steam charts, and away from Steam it's Call of Duty: Warzone that's drawing in big numbers, with 15 million players in its first week.

It sure would be interesting to see what happens to Fortnite's numbers as more schools around the world close.

Here's our round-up of the various conventions and community events that have been canceled due to coronavirus.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.