Vikki Blake
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Oh, look – Steam’s gone and broken its own concurrent record. Again.
Just a fortnight ago, the PC client secured a new record of 34,649,583 players, but earlier today (Sunday, 17th March), Steam has once again set a new simultaneous user record of 36.3m players.
According to SteamDB, 11.5m of those were actively online and in a game at the time the record was set, with the other 25m or so logged in and/or idle at the time.
It’s a testament not just to Steam’s audience power, but also to the enduring appeal of PC gaming. Steam’s concurrent counts initially began to climb around the time the world began going into lockdowns at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, but even now, it seems millions of us would rather do nothing else on a Sunday other than settle down in front of our PCs for a session or two.
More interestingly still, while these kinds of records are often set when a new game causes a bit of a buzz – such as the record-breaking Palworld, for instance – this weekend, there’s not really anything of note going on; it’s just people jumping into their favourite games.
Counter-Strike 2 is as popular as ever – it’s once again secured a whopping 1.4m concurrent player peak in the last 24 hours – whilst the rest of the top five rounds out exactly the same way as last time the record was broken, too; Dota 2, PUBG, Apex Legends, and Helldivers 2 have clocked up 725,000, 707,000, 434,000, and 458,000 simultaneous player peaks, respectively.
Naraka: Bladepoint, Rainbow Six Siege, GTA 5, and Baldur’s Gate 3 complete the top ten. This week, however, Palworld has dropped to eleventh place.