Steam has doubled its user base in 5 years. The latest record is more than 41 million concurrent players

Steam remains unrivaled in the digital distribution market and has once again attracted a record number of players.

Even after all these years and various efforts by publishers and developers, Valve's store is still the undisputed leader on PC. To the extent that some players even equate Steam with PC gaming.

The power of this platform is evidenced by its successive activity records. Over the past weekend, more than 41.6 million users were using Steam simultaneously. Moreover, this is the third time this year that a new record has been set, and in previous years, Steam has repeatedly raised the bar.

For context: at the start of 2024, the peak number of players hit 33.6 million at the same time, while back in 2020, Steam's record was just under 20 million players. In other words, in just a year and a half, the platform upped its game by about 8 million players, doubling its numbers from over five years ago.

Of course, it's important to point out that just because there are more "peaks" doesn't mean there are more users. It doesn't really matter anyway, because there are plenty of bots on Steam, like the ones used by virtual item traders. It's pretty clear that Valve is still the leader in digital distribution. Even though there's a competitor with deep pockets, they just can't keep up with Steam's features and are actually falling further behind with each new update from Valve.

• Steam
• records
• Valve
• stats (games)
• digital distribution