Steam had a busy weekend, hitting its highest concurrent user count and surpassing its previous record by nearly 300,000. The last record was 18,537,490 users and was set two years ago; but this Sunday saw a peak of 18,801,944 users. That's a whole lot of people, sat at a whole lot of computers.
That figure includes users that were logged into the game client simultaneously, and a tweet sent out by the Steam Database states that only around 5.8 million of those players were actually in-game. No doubt the rest were staring blankly at their growing backlog of games and wondering where to start. But still, that's a pretty impressive figure and no mistake.
There doesn't seem to be any particular game that pushed the number that high this time around, though the record two years ago was down to the popularity of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, according to PC Gamer.
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If you're having a hard time trying to wrap your head around that number, it's roughly three times the population of Finland or half the population of Canada. Alternatively, it would only take another three million people (give or take) placed head to toe to stretch around the circumference of the Earth. And when you've nearly 19 million people already, what's another three?
While this particular peak in users hasn't been attributed to a specific game, Steam saw a huge surge in fans playing The Witcher 3 at the end of December, following the release of the TV series on Netflix. The number of active players was just shy of 94,000, breaking the record for the game, four years after its release.
And while Half-Life: Alyx may not break any records for the overall player count because of the added expense of a VR headset, March is still likely to be a busy month for Steam. That's assuming said game, the first new official Half-Life title in forever, does come out in March. We still don't have a firm release date. Valve, we're waiting... and there are millions of us.
Featured Image Credit: ValveTopics: Half-Life, Valve, The Witcher, Steam
