Steam Reaches Huge New All-Time Player Records

Steam is the premier storefront for PC gaming, and it's only getting bigger all the time. On January 7, Steam smashed not only its record for concurrent online users with 32 million, but also its record for concurrent in-game players, with 10 million. Judging by the usual Steam charts, that's a lot of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

Over at SteamDB, you can take a look at the lifetime concurrent users on Steam, and you can see that it's increased quite a bit in the past few years. In fact, Steam has been breaking its concurrent players record every few days or so for the past month, as the slope of the curve has been quite steep. The number of in-game players has remained slightly more consistent over the same period since 2018, with various peaks and valleys depending on user trends. The highest peak in recent data was roughly 33 million online users and 10.2 million in-game.

Currently, the most popular games on Steam are CS:GO, Dota 2, Lost Ark, PUBG: Battlegrounds, and Rust, in that order. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (which includes Warzone 2.0), Apex Legends, GTA V, FIFA 23, and Team Fortress 2 round out the top 10. In terms of release date, Modern Warfare 2 is the youngest game on the list, and TF2 is by far the oldest. Despite Counter-Strike's dominance, PUBG still has the highest peak player count ever recorded by SteamDB, at more than 3.2 million users--CS:GO's is only 1.3 million. Of course, the Steam Deck is a key part of Valve's continued dominance, and we should only expect the device to become more popular in the coming months.