Valve has once again smashed its own record for the most concurrent users on its Steam platform - only this time, it's done it twice in a single day.
As our pals at PC Gamer reported over the weekend, SteamDB reported a new concurrent peak of 25,415,080 concurrent users on the service yesterday, January 2, 2021, breaching the 25 million milestone for the very first time.
Just a few hours ago, though – but still within the same 24-hour period – Steam has now beaten that with 25,418,674 simultaneous users, 7.2 million of which were actively playing at the time.
Steam's upward trend began in January when Chinese nationals began to self-isolate at the start of the COVID-19 crisis. On February 2nd, Steam's previous record of 18,537,490 users – set in January 2018 – was surpassed, smashing the existing record by an impressive 300,000 to peak at 18,801,944 players. It's gone on to be broken several times since, including a weekend in March which saw numbers breach 20 million for the first time, and then 22 million just a week later.
As we reported just before the holidays, Cyberpunk 2077 was briefly the new most-played game on Steam, overtaking the likes of Dota 2 and CS:GO with over one million concurrent players, even though it's purely single-player.
Not only does this mean that Cyberpunk 2077 overtook multiplayer giants like Dota 2 and CS:GO, but it also set another concurrent player record on Steam for the most-played single-player game. As SteamDB showed at the time, Cyberpunk 2077 peaking at just over 1,000,000 active players on Steam, putting it head and shoulders above both Terraria, which held the previous record at 490,000 players, and Fallout 4 at 473,000 players.
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