Steam Breaks The 7 Million Concurrent Users Barrier

Steam is big. Everyone knows it. If you're a developer trying to sell digitally, and you're not on there, you're missing as much as 80% of the download market. And just to prove how big it is, this weekend Steam saw itself go over the 7 million concurrent users mark for the first time. 7,190,578, spotted VG247. That's more than the population of Hong Kong.

Obviously this surge is thanks to the Autumn Sale that's currently happening. But the thing about Steam peaks is they don't then seem to experience troughs. In January the big news was they'd peaked 5 million.

Even right now, in the early AM of the wrong side of the globe, there 3.7m people logged in, 638k of them currently playing a game. And as VG points out, this is over the biggest console launch of all time. People don't seem to be being dragged away from their PCs.

Dota 2 is still by far and away the most popular game, peaking at 542,906 simultaneous players over the last 24 hours. Over a half a million people playing one game at one time. CS:GO comes in a distant second with 90k, Skyrim and TF2 just a handful of players apart next at around 70k. Fifth and sixth? I'd never have guessed at Civ V and Foot-to-ball Manager 2014, but there you go. 60k a piece. Garry's Mod, Counter-Strike, Terraria and Path Of Exile make up the rest. What a fantastically eclectic list, with only three FPS games amongst them. Three indies in there, which is just bloody incredible. And a spreadsheet sim.

Still, it's such a shame PC gaming is dead, eh?

Photo credit: Nils Öberg