Steam, Valve’s massively popular PC gaming platform, has reached a new record for concurrent players. Today, January 8, the service exceeded 18 million concurrent users for the first time ever. This is up from 16 million in October 2017 and 14 million in January 2017, so that’s a lot of growth very quickly. Bear in mind that this figure is how many people were logged in at the same time; they might not have been playing a game.
Whatever the case, Steam’s public data shows that the number of people logged in simultaneously today hit 18.4 million. The hugely popular Battle Royale game PUBG was far and away the most popular game on Steam today, with 2.9 million peak concurrent users. So that means around 16 percent of Steam’s users today, at peak, were playing PUBG, which is pretty wild to think about.
Valve’s free-to-play DOTA 2 was the second-most popular game today, with around 765,000 peak concurrent players. That shows how much more popular PUBG is than anything else on Steam right now. It’s also a hit on console, selling 1 million copies in its first 48 hours on Xbox One.
In August last year, Valve revealed some new stats about Steam, including 33 million daily active players and 67 million monthly active players. Valve also said it added 27 million new paying members–people who created a Steam account and then bought something–since January 2016. That works out to around 1.5 million per month over the past 18 months. Steam had 125 million registered users by the company’s latest count.