Steam just had one of its best few days ever in terms of concurrent users and players in-game, with more than 33,675,000 users online for January 7.
That’s a new record, according to Steam DB, which tracks all kinds of data pertaining to Valve’s popular PC gaming platform. On January 6, Steam also broke a new record for number of players in-game, with more than 10,837,000 players actually playing. It was back in January of 2023 that Steam broke 10,000,000 players in-game for the first time.
As for the games that users were playing the most over January 6-7 to break those records, they are mostly the usual suspects. Valve’s own games continue to be among the most popular on the platform, with more than 1.2 million players fragging each other in Counter-Strike 2 on January 7 and Valve’s MOBA Dota 2 surpassing 730,000 players. Team Fortress 2 also broke the top 10, with nearly 160,000 players on January 7.
The rest of the top 10 list in terms of numbers of concurrent players additionally included titles like PUBG: Battlegrounds and Rust, both of which have long been popular on Steam. While most of Steam’s most popular games are live-service multiplayer titles that are endlessly replayable, Baldur’s Gate 3 has proved to have real staying power since its launch back in August 2023. On January 7, nearly 300,000 people were playing Larian Studio’s ambitious RPG on Steam, beating out titles like Grand Theft Auto 5 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3/Warzone. Also making an impressive showing was recent indie sensation Lethal Company, which saw more than 200,000 concurrent players at its peak on January 7.
If 2023 was any indication, 2024 will no doubt be just as big, if not bigger, for Steam. More than 14,535 games launched on Steam in 2023, a 2,000-game increase from 2022 and more than double the number of games that launched on the platform back in 2018. The number of games released on Steam last year dwarfed the number of releases on any other platform, with the runner-up, the Nintendo Switch, only receiving 2,360 games in 2023.
