Steam passes 27M concurrent users to set a new record

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That number's just going to keep getting bigger.

An image of the "Stonks" meme with the Steam logo overlayed onto it. The meme depicts a man in a suit with numbers trending upwards.
(Image credit: Jon Bolding)

After breaking 26 million concurrents in April, Steam has now set a new record, with 27,384,959 accounts logging onto Valve's launcher all at once, as counted by SteamDB. Of those, 7.8 million were in-game at the time, which is under the record 8.1 million from March of 2020, but still rather a lot of people playing CS:GO.

Thanksgiving weekend certainly helps perk the numbers up, as Americans doing seasonal tech support for their family turn on computers that have sat idle in someone's den or whatever for months while Steam logs on automatically. So do the Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales, and all of those people buying Cyberpunk 2077 while it's half-price and then leaving 'very positive' user reviews. (It's still the top global seller on Steam, and has received 22,579 recent reviews, 84% of which are positive.)

Today's top games by peak player count were CS:GO (915,791 players), Dota 2 (677,744), and PUBG (344,841). Halo Infinite managed a respectable 146,212 players, and however many of those were cheaters driving Xbox players to demand they be allowed to opt-out of crossplay, it was too many. 

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Jody Macgregor
Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

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.

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