Steam Sets New Record With Over 36 Million Concurrent Users - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 18 March 2024 / 2,039 Views
Valve's Steam has set a new record over the weekend for concurrent users online at the same time with over 36 million, according to SteamDB.
Steam reached 36,354,393 concurrent users online on Sunday, which is the first time the service surpassed 36 million users online at the same time.
The Steam Spring Sale launched at the end of last week and runs until March 21 at March 21 at 10am PT / 1pm ET. Thousands of games have been discounted on Steam. This likely has helped boost the number of users online.
36 million https://t.co/jjdMrAVLgc pic.twitter.com/VGLaGPgrx5
— SteamDB (@SteamDB) March 17, 2024
There were 14,535 games released on Steam in 2023, which is up from the previous record of 12,562 games released in 2022.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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It took just a week to increase by another million? lol
Steam has actually surpassed PlayStation in MAU's. Steam averages 132 million and PS4/PS5 average 123 million.
It's insane to think that's just Steam! If you wanna play Fortnite, you have to use Epic Games Store and Riot has their own launcher for League of Legends (which averages 117 million MAU's by itself) and Valorant. Minecraft and Roblox are also not on Steam, so those games have their own MAU's.
But yeah, PC gaming is too large for developers to ignore these days. And unlike a new console gen, you don't have to rebuild your audience on PC.
GTA6 skipping PC for awhile though so doesn't seem so hard for Rockstar
That's not the case at all if you actually know how the studio operates. Rockstar has been doing this for all their games for the past 15+ years and Rockstar devs have said they put in extra work on the PC versions of their games so that they can be the best version of their games. Their games sell an insane amount on PC. GTA V is still always in the top 10 best selling games on Steam and sales are around 35 million.
Most of all though, my point was majority of developers for years would never ship to PC. You think of companies like Sega, Capcom, or Bandai Namco, they never shipped their games to PC. They were always console only publishers. Times have changed.
They have special agreements with consoles. They can't escape Steam in PC but consoles have to fight to get GTA titles.
In reality they do it to get people to double dip and cover it with bad excuses like developing multiple version simultanously is hard (when studios that sell 100 times less can manage to do so). Honestly think more people should call them out on that.
That's a few users.
I feel like it might be newsworthy when they hit another milestone, like 40 million. But we don't need an article every time they reach 1 million more concurrent users.
Nintendo really should release some of their games (namely Xenoblade Chronicles) on PC through Steam someday. For comparison, the GameCube and WIi U platforms combined sold right about as many users as this is. And even the N64 sold less than this number of users.
I know Nintendo is really, really stubborn and dependent on their software exclusivity. But I'm a hopeful fool, I suppose.
And this is just "concurrent" users. Not active monthly users.
I.E. As of the latest data in 2021, Steam has 132 million users... But that was also when the platform had 27~ million concurrent users... If there was a linear relationship with concurrent and monthly users we COULD be looking at 176~ million active users.
