Hours ago, Steam hit a new milestone – 40 million peak concurrent users online on the platform. This monumental figure was secured with 12 million players worldwide being in a game as the total number crept over the 40 million mark.
To put that into perspective, the most recent estimates suggest that Microsoft has sold around 30 million Xbox Series consoles since they debuted in 2020. That means that even if every person who ever bought an Xbox Series X or Series S were to log on simultaneously, they’d still need 10 million people to hit Steam’s peak player count.
Impressive Stuff
Steam is a powerhouse of a platform, and PC gaming is exploding. Recently, it was revealed in a data-driven report that PC gaming has been outpacing ‘living room console’ revenue since 2011. Collectively, the PC gaming market has earned 225% more than ‘combined console’ spend in the last decade or so.
If you think about it for a moment, it becomes pretty incredible.
At one point in the last few hours, 40 million people were online on Steam all at the same time. That’s more than the population of Canada, and it almost beats the population of Greece, Portugal, Hungary, and Switzerland combined.
It was recently estimated that Microsoft has managed to shift around 30 million Xbox Series consoles since 2020, pacing far behind Sony with more than 70 million PlayStation 5 sales. That means that more people are using Steam right now than have purchased Xbox consoles in a five-year window.
It’s apples and oranges as Steam has built up that repository of users over a very long period, but it’s certainly indicative of the wider power of PC gaming. It has even been estimated that Xbox Game Pass has around 34 million subscribers, so Steam trumps that as well.
Are you one of the 40 million? Let us know what you use Steam for in the comments.
For more Insider Gaming coverage, check out the news that John Cena has made a cryptic GTA 6 post on Instagram
Xbox needs let us transfer our games to Steam merge the Xbox and Steam libraries. Use Steam on Xbox.