Valve’s Steam platform was launched in 2003, For most of that time it has seen slow and steady growth as it has grown from a place where you can buy Half-Life games into the virtual gaming market for PC.. But what happened over the past two years has been the same unbelievable.
In 2015, Steam set a record for concurrent users—The number of people registered with the service — is 10 million. That was 12 years after the service was launched.
In 2017, We reported that Steam has set a new record, this time with 14 million. Not bad growth for only two years.
In March 2020, that record faded to 20 million. March 2020 is an important point in this timeline; For most countries, this was the time when the pandemic really started, lockdowns started, and a lot of people started spending a lot of time online (and realized that you can play a lot of very good video games on Steam, often at very low prices).
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We reached 28 million users earlier this year—more than the combined population of countries like Australia and Taiwan —and now, in late October, We’ve hit the impressive approximate number of 30 million, and the number of users logged in earlier today was 30,032,005.
Note that this is not the number of people playing at any given time, just the number of people logged into the platform, an achievement often accomplished simply by turning on your computer. If you want to know the number of actual users in a game at that time, SteamDB’s numbers peak at 8.5 million, which is still a massive number, and a (relatively) big jump from even earlier in 2022, when it was higher than the number of active players” Between seven and eight million.
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