Steam Breaks The Concurrent Users Record Once Again

When people talking about PC games these days, they might as well be talking about Steam. It's exceptionally rare, if not borderline non-existent, for games to be installed from a disk these days. Does your PC even have a CD tray in 2024?

Even other platforms can't quite compete because they often suffer from far more limited libraries or less robust set of features. As such, a lot of people tend to look at the Steam player numbers when it comes to tracking PC playerbase as a whole.

Naturally, the same applies to not just individual games but total users as well. Just in January of last year, Steam peaked at a remarkable 32 million users.

Now, a little over one and a half years later, we are sitting at 38,366,131 concurrent users, with no signs of ever slowing down. The cause behind such a drastic growth could come from many factors, but it would feel wrong not to highlight the recent release of Black Myth: Wukong.

The Chinese AAA game achieved resounding success with 2,415,714 players at its peak. With the majority of sales coming from China, it's likely that Steam acquired a hefty amount of new players from Asia.

With that said, PC gaming was never niche or unappealing, so the steady growth only makes sense. It also helps that exclusives almost feel like a thing of the past. Microsoft has long abandoned the practice, with all of their games launching on PCs, and even Sony has warmed up to porting their games over. Additional profit never hurts, after all. Especially with the ever-growing cost of making AAA games. Nintendo is the only company that doesn't seem even remotely intent on releasing their titles outside of their own consoles.

With that in mind, the value proposition of owning a PC only got better over time. While a great desktop will still cost you, the flexibility that it offers and the longevity of top-notch PCs is nothing to sneeze at. Unless something drastically changes in the consoles market, we can expect for PCs to only gain more and more popularity.