Happy new year! We're back of from two weeks of balancing dutiful shifts of family time with prolonged periods of PC gaming. From the look of Steam's player stats page , we're not alone. Steam has just broken the five million concurrent users barrier.
The Steam Christmas sale will have plenty to do with it no doubt, but the success and longevity of Skyrim has also helped. It's still easily the most played game on Steam at the moment. Team Fortress 2 sits in a distant second place.
Not a bad result in a year that saw EA launch a serious competitor in the form of their Origin client. Origin don't make their user numbers public, but it's the only place to get hold of The Old Republic digitally. Both services must be rolling in Christmas cash. It looks like digital distribution is going to continue to grow in 2012. What did you pick up from the Steam sale?
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Part of the UK team, Tom was with PC Gamer at the very beginning of the website's launch—first as a news writer, and then as online editor until his departure in 2020. His specialties are strategy games, action RPGs, hack ‘n slash games, digital card games… basically anything that he can fit on a hard drive. His final boss form is Deckard Cain.
