Big Valve.

There's clearly no stopping Steam's continued growth. Valve's PC digital store and social platform set a new user concurrent record on Sunday, with a staggering 43,505,724 million users (via SteamDB).

Yes, that's over 43 million players online at the same time across the world, both in-game and out. Incidentally, the number of players in-game also went up to more than 14 million, itself a new record.

That is the highest ever number of simultaneous users in Steam's 23-year history. It's also the second time Valve's platform has broken its own record this year, having attracted over 42 million concurrent players in January.

Steam's Autumn Sale recently ended, so it's curious the new record was set shortly afterwards and not during the sale. That said, the last few weeks have seen a number of popular game launches, most notably the worldwide release of free-to-play MMO Aion 2, which peaked at 397,905 concurrent players at launch.

Steam's list of the top ten most played games remains mostly the same outside of that, except for the big jump in Deadlock numbers (262,145 peak concurrent) off the back of a major update. Deadlock is Valve's third-person MOBA-shooter hybrid, which the developer has yet to officially announce.

These are all signs of Steam's continued expansion and its unshaken dominance over the PC space. All that user traffic, of course, translates to revenue for Valve. According to recent estimates, Valve made $15bn (~£11.10bn) from Steam by September, with Forza Horizon 6 being Steam's biggest new release so far this year by revenue.

Mentioned in this article