Credit: Unsplash
2022 is shaping up to be a good year for PC gaming.
As they do every year, Valve’s PC gaming platform and marketplace Steam ran their annual holiday sale in the back half of December (and as of writing, it’s still going on for one more day). The sale featured the usual spate of deep discounts on games big and small, old and new, and as usual, it was a great opportunity to bulk up your library in preparation for a long, cold winter that may or may not be spent once again in quarantine.
However, for whatever reason, it seems this year folks were especially into the sales, because as of this past weekend, Steam has broken another concurrent user record. According to SteamDB, a third-party site that monitors the general flow and activity of Steam’s userbase, early on Sunday morning, there were exactly 27,942,036 users logged into Steam at the exact same time. That beats out the previous concurrent user record of 26,922,926 set back in March of 2021.
It just keeps on getting bigger. https://t.co/oKpcr1BL04
— PC Gamer (@pcgamer) January 3, 2022
To clarify, that number is only the users who were actively logged into their Steam accounts. The number of users who were actually playing a game was only 8,219,950, though that’s still a record-breaker, as it beats out the active player record of 8,171,592 set in March of 2020, right when the pandemic was first getting into swing. The games that were getting the most active users over the weekend included the usual suspects like Counter-Strike, PUBG, and DOTA 2, though new MMORPG New World is closing in on them from fourth place.
