Valve's omnipresent gaming platform Steam kicked off the year 2024 in spectacular fashion, recording a record number of concurrent users and a record number of users actively playing games. Last weekend, 33,675,229 concurrent users logged into Steam, surpassing the previous record of 33,598,520 set in March 2023.

At about the same time, Steam also set a new record for the number of users who actually played games: 10,837,140, of which about 2 million were split between Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2 (both Valve games, by the way).

Both are impressive numbers, even if the former is more likely to be people dabbling elsewhere while running Steam in the background. As for why now, you guessed it, but I'll give you the clichéd observation that, at least in the UK, the weather this weekend was truly awful and many of us needed a little game-playing refreshment after our first week back at work.

Valve recently announced its annual Best of Steam 2023. There were some big surprises in that list, most notably the fact that many of us play Half-Life. Valve's anniversary update, which was full of surprises, no doubt helped. Still, not bad for a game released in 1998. Top sellers were probably as expected, with "Baldur's Gate 3" and "Starfield" leading the pack.

Even stranger is the user-voted Steam Awards 2023, where Starfield seems to have won the innovation award. The most interesting game for me was Red Dead Redemption 2, a great game but one whose devotees have lamented the lack of Rockstar support over the last few years.

Democracy manifested! It remains to be seen what 2024 will bring: Steam continues to win.