Recently, Steam’s peak player count smashed through the previous all-time high recorded on the platform. Out of nowhere, Steam’s top CCU peak reached heights of 33,675,229, sitting comfortably atop the previous all-time high that was recorded in March 2023. Over time, Steam’s platform has become more populous, proving the exponentially increasing power of the PC gaming market and the growth of the industry in general.
Exponential Growth
If you take a glance at SteamDB’s handy charts, you can see a clear and well-defined path of growth for Steam, which is the number one destination for users looking to buy, download, and play games on PC. This weekend, a whopping 33,675,229 people were online at the same time on Steam.
Since 2020 and the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, PC gaming has seen a considerable boom. For a while, hardware was readily available, everyone was at home building their rigs, and content creation – which is primarily a PC-based pursuit – was exploding in popularity. For the most part, that trend has continued across the board.
There might have been a global downturn in the number of users consuming created content and live streams, but the number of people playing games through Steam has only skyrocketed over the last few years. We’ve seen some monumental releases over the last year that have contributed massively to those figures, though – Hogwarts Legacy, Counter-Strike 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, Cyberpunk 2077 (update and DLC), Sons of the Forest, and The Finals.
Most commonly, you’ll see Valve’s games topping the Steam charts, with Counter-Strike and Dota 2 often being standout titles that gamers around the world are enjoying in the hundreds of thousands at any given moment.
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