Steam’s new concurrent player record is higher than Ivory Coast’s population

Steam has beaten its concurrent user player record yet again with 28.2million simultaneous users over the weekend.

SteamDB reported that 28,230,853 people were logged into Steam at around 2PM UTC (AKA UK time) yesterday (Sunday January 9). That’s just over 200,000 more users than it had last time it beat its record – a mere week ago.

The number is so huge that it actually works out as the entire population of Ivory Coast and then another million or so people on top of that. At the time of writing, SteamDB is recording 21.9million users online which still works out as not far off the population of Sri Lanka or over seven times the population of Wales.

Geography lessons aside, that’s a pretty huge number for the phenomenally successful games platform.

Interestingly, when that number was achieved, nearly 20million of those users were not actually in-game. That suggests that many users are using Steam to chat to friends or they may simply have the client open to download updates.

As before, for players in-game, popular titles included Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and Dota 2. PUBG: Battlegrounds, and Apex Legends also proved very popular.

Recently, Steam has reported an increase in Quest 2 users over Christmas. 39.62 per cent of Steam users had an Oculus Quest 2 headset connected to the service.

The Witcher on Netflix has also fuelled an increase in The Witcher 3 players on Steam lately.

Strong stats also form much of Escape from Tarkov‘s success story lately too. The hardcore shooter had a very strong New Year showing – while this includes 56million raids survived, it also notes 57million player deaths and 106million Scavs killed. Players also enjoyed watching others play the game, as the game attracted 475,546 peak viewers on Twitch.