Steam has doubled in size in just 5 years, as Monster Hunter Wilds' launch pushes it beyond 40 million concurrent users

Steam's userbase has grown exponentially in the last few years, as its latest massive concurrent user record has doubled the peak it set less than five years ago.

As highlighted by Twitter user @Okami13_, over the weekend, Steam passed a total of 40 million online users, setting a new record. According to its own chart, 40,263,595 people were all logged in simultaneously yesterday, March 2, at 2pm UTC. Not all of those people were playing games, as SteamDB's chart (which claims the peak was slightly different at 40,270,997 concurrent users) says that 12,727,475 of them were in-game at the time. Even so, that's a lot of people.

Obviously, this is huge, but perhaps the most striking thing about all this is just how far we've come in so little time. It was March 15, 2020 when Steam first passed 20 million concurrent users, at which point SteamDB theorized that the surge could be due to the amount of people staying indoors due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Yesterday, on the other hand, was a fairly regular ol' Sunday, albeit the Sunday after Monster Hunter Wilds' release, which is sure to have helped break the record when it's been comfortably passing one million concurrent players since its launch on Friday. Steam Next Fest was also in full swing, so there'll definitely have been plenty of people getting stuck into demos for upcoming new games.

While these things definitely will have contributed, gaining an extra 20 million users in less than half a decade really is something else – the platform's growth doesn't seem to be slowing down at all. Who knows, perhaps it'll be able to double itself again in the next five years? No pressure, Steam.

Be sure to check out our Monster Hunter Wilds review to find out why the action RPG is the new peak of the series, and our guide to the best Monster Hunter Wilds weapons if you're diving in yourself.