What had been you doing this weekend? If you had been within the UK, like us, you might have discovered your self caught in the home enduring a reasonably nasty storm that lined most of our islands for some 48 hours. If you had been within the US, you might have been wanting on in horror as our political institution fell aside, like a poorly-erected fence in a stormy Belfast backyard.

If you’re studying this now, and also you’re into video games, you had been doubtless logged into Steam, although. For the primary time ever, Valve’s PC platform managed to draw over 30 million customers all on the identical time.

For context, that’s greater than the populations of all 50 US states (excluding California). You’d want to collect everybody from the US’ most 16 populous cities as a way to attain 30 million – and all these individuals had been on Steam on the identical time this weekend. It boggles the thoughts.

Though graphs from SteamDB notice that solely about 10 million individuals had been really in-game (learn: enjoying one thing and never simply looking/idling), the numbers present one more large enhance within the file variety of concurrent gamers; the latest file earlier than that was the nearly-as-impressive 27 million concurrent customers tracked again in November 2021.

The Northern hemisphere autumn/winter interval is standard for Steam smashing data; the aforementioned file that was simply damaged was set round this time of yr, and earlier than that the 25 million participant file was set on January 4, 2021.

Steam has been on an upwards development in customers because the starting, actually, however issues actually kicked off in March 2020 and the Covid-19 pandemic, the place the service logged 20 million customers for the primary time since 2003 (when the service launched).

Given the rising success of the Epic Game Store – typically propped up by exclusives and offers – it’s fascinating to see Steam proceed to develop, and at such a fee. For a service that’ll be celebrating its twentieth anniversary subsequent yr, that’s fairly good going.