Steam defies RAM-ageddon and the AI-pocalypse to smash through a new concurrent user record, and I'll see you back here in like 4 months when it somehow does it again

TF2 Heavy giving the Bret Rambo thumbs up

(Image credit: Valve, YouTuber Mora Madness)

Chalk up a win for small business! The Seattle offices of Valve Corporation—a plucky upstart company co-founded by Washington businessman Gabe "Gaben" Newell—must have been abuzz recently, when its videogame storefront Steam pipped a steamy milestone in its concurrent user metrics.

Sorry, I've written so many articles about Steam's concurrent user records that I decided to try talking about it like a local news channel covering a bake sale, just to see how it feels. Anyway, over the weekend (Sunday, to be exact), Steam broached the 42 million concurrent user limit, hitting a new record of 42,042,778 users online at the same time (per SteamDB). Not a bad way to kick off the year, if you're a titanic videogame storefront.

RAM is absurdly expensive because a cabal of billionaires has bought up, like, all of it to plug into the data centres powering their brain-melting lie engines. SSDs are more expensive too, as NAND production for AI server drives subtracts from production of NAND production for mere mortals like you and me. Oh, and GPUs are ridiculously pricey when their makers deign to remember videogames exist at all. Because of, yeah, AI.

An image of the "Stonks" meme with the Steam logo overlayed onto it. The meme depicts a man in a suit with numbers trending upwards.

Artist's impression of current events. (Image credit: Jon Bolding)

So it's perhaps some small encouragement that, for all that it truly blows to try to assemble a gaming PC in the year 2026, the dominant PC game storefront continues to hoover up users like some kind of, ah, hoover. You hear that, Altman? Buy up all the memory you want*, we'll just keep playing on our 6-year-old CPUs and 16GB of RAM and keep on trucking.

*Please stop doing this, actually, if you happen to be reading.

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One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.

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