Clearly since the start of the COVID 19 pandemic, Steam has continued to break records in terms of use. The latest to run. Explanations.
The new record of simultaneous users on Steam is … 28 million players. By way of comparison, this is more than the total population of Australia or even Cameroon. For the record, the 27 million mark was crossed in November 2021. Very clearly the pandemic has a significant impact on Steam, not to mention the fact that overall the number of PC gamers is growing year by year.
The number of concurrent users on Steam has seen strong growth during the year 2020, due to the impact of COVID-19, but it is clear that this growth also continued in 2021.
The peaks reached each year in January:
Jan 2019: 17.6 million
January 2020: 18.3 million
Jan 2021: 25.4 million
Jan 2022: 28.2 million
Valve rubs their hands with Steam
Obviously, 28 million connected players does not mean that 28 million people are actually playing on Steam, far from it. But this remains a good clue on the “reservoir” of customers available to Valve. Unsurprisingly, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is in the top position of the most played games with a peak of 1.3 million players at the same time. Which is already pretty huge.
This number of potential players is a boon for publishers. Starting with Sony Interactive Entertainment, more and more open to the idea of deploying exclusives on our good ol ‘ personal computer. Let’s just remember that the PC version of God of War will be released this January 2022!
