Steam has been on a roll for the past few years. This time last year, the platform had 28 million concurrent users (open in new tab), up 3 million from the previous year. This past weekend, SteamDB (open in new tab) recorded that number soaring to a new peak of 33,078,963 players logging into Steam simultaneously.

An increase of 4 million concurrent users in 12 months is very impressive growth, and it's not the only record Valve's platform shattered over the weekend. The 33 million concurrent users is the number of players logged into Steam, but according to Eurogamer (opens in new tab), 10,284,586 people were actively playing something on January 8. This is the first time that the number of simultaneous active users on the platform has exceeded 10 million.

Classic games like CS:GO, Apex Legends, Dota 2, and Grand Theft Auto 5 again topped the chart (open in new tab) of games people were playing at the platform's peak. But games not seen this time last year also dominated the top of the list: Amazon's MMO Lost Ark was among the top 10 games on January 9, along with Wallpaper Engine. Most surprisingly, "Goose Goose Duck," like "Among Us. This game has been out since October 2021, but has exploded in popularity over the past month or two in a surprisingly similar fashion to the game that inspired it (albeit helped by K-Pop). (Opens in new tab) It even managed to surpass the simultaneous player count record (opens in new tab) for "Along Us" at the beginning of the year.

Could the difference in growth between last year's 2021 and 2022 have something to do with the fact that Steam Deck has shipped to a handful of places over the past 12 months? It makes sense that the concurrent numbers would be so high, especially now that the holiday season is over and inevitably more people are picking up Valve's handheld console; the Steam Deck spent most of the year on backorder, so now that the console is much more readily available, it's already In a year's time we will see even higher numbers.