Steam breaks its own record with 10 million concurrent in-game users and 33 million active this past weekend

What just happened? Steam is constantly setting new concurrent user records these days. Valve’s platform did it again over the weekend, but this time another record was broken at the same time: the number of active players, which finally surpassed 10 million.

It was only in October that Steam first passed the 30 million concurrent users mark. The figure meant that the record had increased by 10 million in just two years. That record was broken again in November when it hit 31,379,760 and reached a new high of 33,078,963 on January 8, according to SteamDB.

The concurrent user record covers everyone logged into Steam simultaneously; the number of people actually playing games (active users) is always significantly lower. In addition to concurrent users, the weekend also saw a new record for the number of active users, reaching a massive 10,284,568.

The list of most popular games people were playing during this time contains familiar names: CS: GO, Dota 2, PUBG: Battlegrounds, Apex Legends, and GTA V, to name a few. They’re joined by Goose Goose Duck, a game of social deduction where players and their fellow geese must work together to complete a mission. Yes, it’s a lot like Among Us. Elsewhere, Amazon Games’ free-to-play Lost Ark MMO remains popular despite recent reviews pushing its overall rating from Mostly Positive to Mixed.

Another game in the charts is Wallpaper Engine. It enables users to create, browse, and share Windows desktop wallpapers, but its popularity likely comes from its ability to evade China’s ban on pornography, hence why over 200,000 of its positive reviews are written in Chinese.

With Valve’s annual Steam Winter Sale recently ending, it appears that plenty of people who grabbed a few top titles at discounted prices were enjoying them over the weekend. The increase in users will partly be down to more Steam Decks getting into the hands of gamers, too, especially over the holidays. With records being broken every few months, don’t expect Valve’s platform to run out of steam anytime soon (sorry).

h/t: Eurogamer