Steam Breaks Concurrent User Record at Start of New Year
2020 was an incredibly important year for Steam. Back when 2020 first began, the state of the world changed in just a few short months and everyone was stuck at home. With everyone indoors, people took to online gaming platforms like Steam to take their mind off the situation and this led to several records being broken by Steam. Following New Year's Eve, yet another record has been broken.
Since the pandemic first hit, COVID-19 impacted various facets of everyday life and negatively affected many different industries as a result. Although, from a financial standpoint, the gaming industry definitely benefited the most from the pandemic. Despite numerous game release delays in 2020, a lot of profit was made in terms of digital gaming, console sales, game sales overall. Arguably, Steam was the platform that gained the most amount of mileage out of the pandemic.
All throughout 2020, Steam's record for online users has been getting consistently broken over and over again. However, it seems that once again, that record has been broken following New Year's Eve. For the first time in Steam's history, the amount of concurrent online users surpassed twenty-five million. Considering most were quarantined for New Year's Eve, combined with the holiday season in general, it makes sense that so many people would be online at this time.
In any case, the game that largely contributed to the online player base was unsurprisingly Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. With other titles like Dota 2 and PUBG pulling their weight as well, and surprisingly, Cyberpunk 2077 also maintained a high amount of online users. Back when the game first came out, Cyberpunk 2077 became the first single-player Steam game to reach over one million online players.
It's amazing how much traction the platform has gotten within the last year. Not just as a result of the pandemic, but also in terms of the amount of popular games to surface over the course of 2020. With landmark titles like Hades and Among Us bringing in so many new users and with even more games on the horizon, it will be interesting to see how soon the record gets broken again.
Steam's record for concurrent users was broken just a couple of weeks ago and the fact that it has already been broken so soon after the fact is shocking to say the least. Though, with the release of COVID-19 vaccine on the horizon, it will be interesting to see if Steam will be able to keep this same kind of extreme momentum up going into 2021.
Source: SteamDB
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