Steam has once again smashed its own record of the highest number of concurrent players recorded online today - not once, but twice.
Earlier today, SteamDB recorded 31,379,760 simultaneous users, but later this evening, this had crept up even further, hitting a staggering 31,906,400 concurrent players.
Steam itself - which usually offers different figures - says that the record now sits at 31,953,262. Perhaps more impressively still, not all of those players were idle or AFK at the time; SteamDB reckons 9.4 million people were actively in-game or using the client software at the time the record was set.
Steam's records are usually broken at times when lots of us are off work or stuck at home, so it makes sense that over the extended holiday weekend, more people are online playing games than usual - either because they're enjoying the free time... or are escaping their families.
Steam's upward trend began two years ago in January 2020 when the world began to self-isolate at the start of the COVID-19 crisis. On February 2, Steam's existing record of 18,537,490 users – set in January 2018 – was surpassed, smashing the existing record by an impressive 300,000 to peak at 18,801,944 players.
It's gone on to be broken several times since, including a weekend in March 2020 that saw numbers breach 20 million for the first time, and then 22 million just a week later. We saw 24.7 million users peak in December 2020, 26.5 million in February 2021, and then 27.1 million concurrent users at the beginning of the year.
At the end of October, the PC platform topped 30 million users on the platform at once for the very first time.
As for what games are keeping us busy this weekend? Well, Steam lists the top games this holiday weekend as CS:GO and Dota 2, along with Modern Warfare 2, Lost Ark, and PUBG: Battlegrounds.
The second half of our most-played games chart for the weekend includes Apex Legends, GTA 5, Team Fortress 2, Rust, and New World, respectively.
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