Valve's omnipresent games platform Steam has started off 2024 with a bang, registering both its highest-ever number of concurrent users and also its highest-ever number of users actively playing a game. Over the last weekend 33,675,229 concurrent users were logged-in to Steam, which beats the previous record of 33,598,520 set in March 2023.
During roughly the same period, Steam also had its highest-ever number of users actually playing a game: 10,837,140 players, with around two million of those split across Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2 (both, incidentally, Valve games).
Those are both incredible numbers, even if with the former it's a lot of us having Steam running in the background while we dawdle around elsewhere. As for why now, your guess is as good as mine but I'd go with the banal observation that the weather was really shitty this weekend, in the UK at least, and a lot of us probably needed a little gaming decompression after the first week back at work.
Valve recently released the annual Best of Steam 2023, a showcase of what was played most and made the most money in a tier list. There are some big surprises in there, perhaps most notably that a boatload of us have been playing Half-Life. No doubt Valve's anniversary update, which was chock-full of surprises, helped with that. Still, not bad for a game released in 1998. The top sellers are perhaps more expected, with the likes of Baldur's Gate 3 and Starfield leading the pack.
Even odder were the Steam Awards 2023, voted for by users, and resulting in things like Starfield winning an innovation award which… yeah. The funniest for me was Red Dead Redemption 2, a magnificent game but one whose devotees bemoan Rockstar's lack of support for the last several years, scooping the Labour of Love gong.
Democracy manifest! Time to see what 2024 will bring because what else can you say: Steam keeps on winning.
