Yes, Valve has broken its own concurrent Steam users record yet again

Steam peaked at 26,401,443 users earlier today.

Valve has once again broken its own record for the highest number of concurrent players recorded online: 26.4 million users.

Steam broke the same record a staggering six times last year as an unprecedented number of players were concurrently online as the coronavirus pandemic continued to surge. Before today, the highest concurrent player count seen on Steam was 25.4 million users in early January 2021.

Now, according to SteamDB, Valve's PC platform has hit another record high, with 26,401,443 concurrent users on the service earlier today.

As the table below indicates, it shows a growing trend in PC play that sees Valve continue to grow and maintain its userbase.

Steam also hit the 120 million monthly active users milestone last month, too, fuelled by people staying at home and playing video games.

"While Steam was already seeing significant growth in 2020 before COVID-19 lockdowns, video game playtime surged when people started staying home, dramatically increasing the number of customers buying and playing games, and hopefully bringing some joy to counter-balance some of the craziness that was 2020," Valve said.

As Wes reported at the time, putting Steam's booming popularity into context, that 120 million monthly active users number is higher than Xbox Live and PlayStation Network's equivalent figures. In a September 2020 interview with CNN, Xbox boss Phil Spencer said Xbox Live reaches over 100 million people each month and in July 2020, Sony announced PlayStation Network had 103 million monthly active users.

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Vikki Blake

Vikki Blake

Contributor  |  _vixx

When​ ​her friends​ ​were falling in love with soap stars, Vikki was falling in love with​ ​video games. She's a survival horror survivalist​ ​with a penchant for​ ​Yorkshire Tea, men dressed up as doctors and sweary words. She struggles to juggle a fair-to-middling Destiny/Halo addiction​ ​and her kill/death ratio is terrible.