Steam has once again broken its all-time concurrent player record, as it reached over 24 million simultaneously active players on the platform yesterday. Steam previously reached over 20 million concurrent players back in March, beating its previous record of 18.5 million from a month before. The sudden increase in active users could be somewhat attributed to all the lockdowns and quarantines that began being implemented at the time, but there's no question that Steam’s userbase has been steadily rising over the years as more games launch on the platform and gaming becomes increasingly mainstream.
As published on Steam's own stats page, the platform reached a peak of over 24.7 million concurrent users on December 12, 2020, with Cyberpunk 2077, CS:GO, and Dota 2 being the games that had the most players on the platform at the time. Steam also reached over 23.8 million users on December 11, around 24 hours before reaching its current peak. Some of the other popular games on the platform at the time also included PUBG, which had a peak of over 400,000 concurrent players, and The Game Awards' Best Mobile Game and Best Multiplayer winner Among Us, with almost 200,000 concurrent players.
The massive increase in Steam’s concurrent players numbers is being primarily driven by the launch of Cyberpunk 2077, which saw over a million concurrent players when it launched on Steam on December 10, 2020. On the other hand, Valve-developed CS:GO and Dota 2 have been mainstays of the platform for a long time with very active competitive scenes, which help to keep its casual playerbase active. Notably, CS:GO surpassed Dota 2’s all-time concurrent player record earlier this year.
Source: Steam