Steam achieves a new record with over 33.6 million concurrent users

Steam, Valve’s popular digital game storefront, has hit a significant milestone with a record-breaking 33,675,229 users logged in to the service at the same time over the weekend.

This is according to SteamDB, a hobbyist website that tracks kinds of Steam data ranging from the historical prices of its games to the service’s overall user count.

SteamDB confirmed the record number in a Tweet yesterday (January 7), where the website also revealed that the previous high of 33,598,520 was set back on March 26, 2023.

The news comes at a time where Steam is facing increasing competition in the PC gaming space, including from the Epic Games Store which was released by Fortnite creators Epic Games in 2018.

In spite of this, it appears that Steam is only continuing to grow and its enduring relevance is fantastic news if you’re someone like me who already has spent countless hours, not to mention a small fortune, on various games on the platform.

A closer look at the data shows that 10,653,243 of these 33,675,229 users were playing a game at the time. A glance at the “Most Played” section of the SteamDB website, which tracks the most popular games on the platform, suggests some of the titles that these users might have been playing.

At the time of writing, the most popular games on Steam are the tactical first-person shooter (FPS) Counter-Strike 2, the competitive MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) Dota 2, and the old favorite battle royale title PUBG: Battlegrounds. This is perhaps a little unsurprising, as these series have been dominating the charts for years. 

Far more interestingly, the smash hit RPG Baldur’s Gate 3 is featured further down in the top ten, alongside the surprise appearance of Monster Hunter: World which has been undergoing a bit of a resurgence as of late.

If you're a Steam user and want some great games to play, visit our guides to the best PC games or the best FPS games for recommendations.