Steam reached a peak record of nearly 28million concurrent users yesterday, beating its previous record of just over 27million players last November.
The information comes from SteamDB, which regularly tracks what’s going on for the game distribution platform. According to its data, it hit a peak of 27.94million players online at 3PM UTC (AKA UK time) yesterday (Sunday January 2). That’s an increase of over 800,000 compared to its previous record which was achieved on November 27 last year.
While that number is huge, many of those players were not playing a game. Only 8.2million were in-game. It’s likely that many users were logged into Steam to chat to friends over the festive period for much of the world.
For those players that were in-game, popular titles included Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2. PUBG: Battlegrounds, Apex Legends, and Team Fortress 2 also dominated the top five.
Last week, Steam released its best of 2021 breakdown which highlighted Dota 2, CS:GO and PUBG: Battlegrounds. Grand Theft Auto 5 remains popular too, hanging around the top ten list.
Steam also recently revealed that many of its highest grossing games are free-to-play titles. The list is likely to grow as Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds will become free-to-play this month.
In other news, an interview with former Bully 2 developers has revealed that some elements of the game were later used in Red Dead Redemption 2. “We really wanted to make sure that people remembered what you did, so if you pulled a prank on your neighbour, they’d remember it,” said one developer in an interview.
The ESRB rating for Elden Ring has also come through. It suggests that we may see quite a lot of severed arms throughout the game, and some swears too.
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