PC gaming: it's a pretty big deal, an alarming statement to read on the pages of PC Gamer dot com, but there are numbers to back it up: Steam once again set a new record for concurrent users on March 3, with 34.6 million people online worldwide.

This is according to SteamDB, which is no stranger to this kind of record-keeping, and is about 1 million more than Steam's January record of 33.6 million concurrent users. 34.6 million is more than the population of Peru, if (PC gaming and Peru) is a record! .

Of these players, the number of players actually participating in the game was almost record-breaking. On the same day, Steam had 11,146,564 simultaneous in-game players, hundreds of thousands less than the 11,582,167 recorded in January.

It is interesting to consider that at the time of Steam's launch, Steam was seen as nothing more than a ruinous and troublesome DRM for Valve games. It was ostensibly a bit of patch software that many gamers regarded as an unwelcome intruder on their taskbars. Even old forum threads to that effect can still be found online. Of course, things have changed now. We've moved all those sentiments to the Epic Games store.

It's not hard to imagine why Steam is currently breaking record after record, with games like "Palworld" and "Helldivers 2" dominating the charts in a quest to establish Pokémon-based capitalism or else wage a hopeless war against bugs and robots to millions of people around the world. And of course, the concept of "gaming" is growing in popularity every year, and the PC is the best place for it. Only on the PC can you play "Horizon Forbidden West" or "Starfield". Sure, with Microsoft's recent moves, we may eventually get to play them on the PS5. But for now," it's desktop only, baby.

Of course, Steam is neither the alpha nor the omega of PC play, so it may be premature to draw conclusions based on that number alone; Steam is the biggest brick in the wall of the great edifice that is PC gaming.