Dota 2 breaks concurrent Steam players record (again)

dota 2

On Saturday more people were playing Dota 2 at the same time than there are residents of St. Louis .

Valve's multiplayer phenomenon surpassed its previous record for concurrent players on Saturday, reaching 329,977 simultaneous users. The stars may have simply aligned to produce an usual amount of free time for PC gamers, but it's more likely that there were piles of people logging into Dota 2 to watch the West Qualifier for The International 3 through the client itself.

Whether or not this makes Dota 2 the most-played game on PC remains unclear. An April report measured from a variety of unnamed sources (but including ancient utilities like Xfire) put Dota 2 above League of Legends. Riot Games claimed in response that a single server shard for LoL exceeded 500,000 simultaneous players at its daily peak. Both sets of data are unverifiable and incomplete, but our gut tells us that League of Legends' longer history (two years more than Dota 2) would give it a higher population worldwide.

Dota 2's weekend spike in concurrent players—which we always encourage you to think of as an indicator of a game's population rather than an exact representation—also comes on the heels of the Interactive Compendium .

Evan Lahti
Global Editor-in-Chief

Evan's a hardcore FPS enthusiast who joined PC Gamer in 2008. After an era spent publishing reviews, news, and cover features, he now oversees editorial operations for PC Gamer worldwide, including setting policy, training, and editing stories written by the wider team. His most-played FPSes are CS:GO, Team Fortress 2, Team Fortress Classic, Rainbow Six Siege, and Arma 2. His first multiplayer FPS was Quake 2, played on serial LAN in his uncle's basement, the ideal conditions for instilling a lifelong fondness for fragging. Evan also leads production of the PC Gaming Show, the annual E3 showcase event dedicated to PC gaming.