Valve’s Steam platform launched all the best way again in 2003, and for a lot of that point noticed gradual and regular development because it grew from a spot you may purchase Half-Life video games to the PC’s default gaming market. What has occurred over the past two years, although, has been unbelievable.

In 2015, Steam set a file for concurrent customers—the variety of individuals logged into the service—at 10 million individuals. That was 12 years after the service launched.

In 2017, we reported that Steam had set a brand new file, this time at 14 million. Not dangerous development for simply two years.

In March 2020, that file had blown out to twenty million. March 2020 is a vital level on this timeline; for many international locations that is when the pandemic actually kicked off, lockdowns started, and much more individuals began spending much more time on-line (and realising that you may play a number of excellent video video games on Steam, usually for very low costs).

We bought to twenty-eight million customers earlier this yr—greater than the complete populations of nations like Australia and Taiwan—and now, in late October, we’ve hit the good spherical variety of 30 million, with the height variety of customers logged on earlier at the moment standing at 30,032,005.

Note that this isn’t the variety of individuals taking part in at anyone time, simply the variety of individuals logged into the platform, a feat that’s usually achieved just by turning your PC on. If you need to know the variety of customers really in a sport at the moment, SteamDB figures put the height at round 8.5 million, which continues to be an infinite determine, and a giant leap (proportionally) even from earlier in 2022, when the very best variety of lively gamers stood at “between seven and eight million”.