Playing host to tens of tens of millions of players across the globe, Steam has long held the position of the preferred PC gaming service. These past few weeks, though, show that the recognition of Valve’s storefront continues to be on the up, with back-to-back record breaking numbers of individuals logging in to Steam.
Since its humble beginnings in September 2003, it’s hard to adequately capture just how far Steam has come and the way much of an effect it continues to have on the PC gaming landscape. Despite the rise (and fall) of many competitors, it stays one in every of, if not the, biggest place to search out one of the best PC games and more, with additions corresponding to the Steam Workshop and Community tabs making it greater than just an easy storefront.
March 2024 has proven to be a fruitful month for Steam, and by extension Valve. At the start of the month, over 34 million users logged into the service, an all-time high. However, this record was then smashed again, just per week ago, as over 35 million users were recorded online. Now, the count has jumped higher still.
According to SteamDB, Steam reached a latest 24-hour peak of 36,354,393 online users on March 17 at 14:00 UTC. To put that into context, that’s just two million shy of Canada’s estimated population. Not everyone who was logged in was playing games, nonetheless, with that specific count coming in at 11, 576,186, which continues to be only a couple of hundred thousand in need of Belgium’s estimated population.
It’s unclear what’s sparked this marked increase in Steam users. However, if the February 2024 Hardware Survey is any indication, we could also be seeing an influx of players from China, given the rise and now dominance of ‘Simplified Chinese’ because the language of alternative for the service. However, there’s only a lot we will extrapolate from retroactive data.
If you’re latest to Steam and are on the hunt for additions to your library, try our greatest Steam Deck games list. The entries there play great on desktop PCs and Valve’s handheld alike, particularly should you’re running a budget-leaning system.
