In late October, Valve announced that its Steam game download service had reached a new high of over 65 million accounts worldwide, 10 years after the first beta client was released. Today, the number of concurrent Steam users reached a new record as well as it surpassed the 7 million mark for the first time.
The new record was reached just a few hours ago, according to Valve"s own stats page, and peaked at 7,190,518 users. Part of the reason for the new surge is the ongoing Steam Autumn Sale, which launched earlier this week with big price cuts on many of the over 3,000 games in Valve"s library of titles. If Valve"s number of over 65 million total Steam users are correct, that means that well over 10 percent of them were logged in at once today. Steam saw the 6 million concurrent user mark broken during last year"s autumn sale.
The new surge in user numbers comes as Valve is preparing to enter a new phase of its Steam service, with plans to launch its own SteamOS that can run games natively as well as stream Windows-based games to televisions. It will also work with third parties to launch Steam Machines based on the OS, along with a new Steam Controller with touchpads instead of analog sticks.
Source: Valve | Image via Valve