Dota 2 breaks Skyrim's record for most concurrent players on Steam

Last night, the (still technically unreleased) Dota 2 beta registered a peak of 297,000 players. This broke the previous record, set by Skyrim, by almost 10,000, making it the most-played game on Steam by concurrent users in history. With the rate they're sending out free keys, this doesn't really surprise me.

Dota 2 is still a long way from scratching its archrival, League of Legends, who reports active players in the millions at this point. Still, considering the popularity of the Steam platform, it's nothing to shake an Iron Branch at. It's been about a year and a half since the game's soft launch at The International in 2011. League, for comparison, has been around for almost four years, counting from the start of open beta.

Hopefully, this rising popularity will lead to more of an in-person tournament scene for Dota as an eSport, which somewhat disappointingly exists mostly in the realm of online competitions.

via PCGamesN

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Len Hafer is a freelancer and lifelong PC gamer with a specialty in strategy, RPGs, horror, and survival games. A chance encounter with Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness changed her life forever. Today, her favorites include the grand strategy games from Paradox Interactive like Crusader Kings and Europa Universalis, and thought-provoking, story-rich RPGs like Persona 5 and Disco Elysium. She also loves history, hiking in the mountains of Colorado, and heavy metal music.