Steam begins 2022 with new concurrent player count record

While many locations around the world have loosened regulations in the recent months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the spread of the Omicron variant has given legitimate concern to the public about leaving the house. As the pandemic continues, the era of staying indoors to play video games doesn’t seem to be disappearing anytime soon. In fact, yesterday’s Steam statistics only indicate that player counts continue to rise into the new year.

According to SteamDB, yesterday reached a peak of 27,942,036 simultaneous users logged into Steam. This signals a new record for Valve’s PC storefront, with the previous record coming in at 27,384,959 accounts this past November. Prior to that, the 26 million barrier was broken earlier the same year. Of the nearly 28 million logged in users, 8,219,950 people were actively playing a game, which is still a significant chunk of gaming.

This steady level of growth is good news for PC players. In the past several years, we’ve seen traditionally console exclusive titles come to PC either day and date with consoles or some time later. In some cases, Japanese studios even make PC ports exclusively for Western territories. With such a steadily rising install base, PC players should expect more studios to consider the platform in development.