Valve has once against smashed its own record for the most concurrent users on its Steam platform.
Our pals at PC Gamer spotted the update on SteamDB yesterday, which clocked 24,776,635 simultaneous users.
Though not confirmed, it's speculated that the release of Cyberpunk 2077 and another rise in COVID-19 global cases has seen more people stay home and jump online than usual.
Steam's upward trend began in January when Chinese nationals began to self-isolate at the start of the COVID-19 crisis. On February 2nd, Steam's previous 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 which saw numbers breach 20 million for the first time, and then 22 million just a week later.
As we reported earlier this week, Cyberpunk 2077 is the new most-played game on Steam, overtaking the likes of Dota 2 and CS:GO with over one million concurrent players, even though it's purely single-player.
The new player stats from Steam came on the day that Cyberpunk 2077 officially launches worldwide, with its player count peaking at precisely 1,003,264, making it the most-played game on the entire platform.
Not only does this mean that Cyberpunk 2077 overtakes multiplayer giants like Dota 2 and CS:GO, but it's also set another concurrent player record on Steam for the most-played single-player game. As SteamDB showed at the time, Cyberpunk 2077 peaking at just over 1,000,000 active players on Steam puts it head and shoulders above both Terraria, which held the previous record at 490,000 players, and Fallout 4 at 473,000 players.
Looking for something new to get stuck into? Here are the best PC games right now.
Ubisoft reaches deal with Tencent to create $4.3 billion mini-Ubisoft subsidiary to "spearhead development" on new Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, and Rainbow Six games
When Destiny 2 "weekly active users dropped lower and faster than we'd seen since 2018," Bungie assembled an A-Team to put out some fires: "We needed to do something"
