Even with competition from the likes of GoG.com and the Epic Games Store, Valve"s Steam service is still the biggest for buying digital PC games, along with development services for game developers. Earlier today, Steam hit a new high record for concurrent players online.
According to SteamDB, the new high record for Steam players is now 34,649,583 online. It also said that 11,146,564 of those folks were actively playing games on Steam instead of just running the Steam. However, the active player record on Steam remains 11,582,167, which was set on January 28, 2024.
It"s not hard to guess why the number of Steam players has continued to go up and up. This year, the service got the benefit of two surprise hit games. One was Palworld, which launched in mid-January and generated 15 million players as of mid-February.
The other was Helldivers 2, which got so popular in mid-February that the developers had to put a concurrent player cap on its servers so it could fix some issues.
Other older games have also been doing well on the service. Valve"s free-to-play shooter Counter-Strike 2 is in the number one spot with over 1.4 million players on Steam in the last 24 hours. Another Valve game, the free-to-play MOBA DOTA 2, is in second with over 700,000 players on the last day. Other free-to-play games like PUBG: Battleground and Apex Legends are also in the top five with hundreds of thousands of players online at once.
That trend of more Steam players will likely keep going. There"s another of highly wishlisted upcoming Steam games that include S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, Homeworld 3, Hades II, Manor Lords, Stormgate. and more. Also, the company continues to sell lots of Steam Deck portable gaming PCs that also help to spread the use of its Steam game store and services.