Steam is officially bigger than Canada with a 41-million concurrent user record

(Image credit: Valve)

Little-known, underground indie videogame platform Steam sure is doing well for itself. The service recently hit a new historical high of 41,666,455 players online at once, per the stoic record-keepers over at SteamDB. That's just a little over the population of Canada and a whole lot higher than the last time it graced our pages for breaking a concurrents record, which was last year when it hit a paltry, piddling, barely noticeable 35 million online users.

The new high score was hit, as you might expect, over a weekend. Last Sunday, to be precise: October 12, with a touch over 13 million players actually in-game. I'd venture to suggest that the release of Battlefield 6 had at least something to do with it. Last weekend was BF6's first, and with DICE's FPS currently a comfortable #14 on the Steam concurrent charts itself, there's likely some overlap there.

Steam library view with dynamic collections enabled and a window for deep searching. — This is what Steam looks like. If you've not seen it before. (Image credit: Valve)

I confess, it does make me a little nervous. As billionaires go, Gabe Newell seems like the one who has deep-fried his brain the least of all of 'em, and Steam in general has never really done me wrong. Nevertheless, it does feel like the platform's dominance represents all of us sticking our eggs in a single basket.

If Steam turned evil tomorrow, would I really be able to easily swap to something else and leave the friends and 1,000+ games I have on there behind? It seems unlikely. Hell, I still use Google because it's all I've used since the late '90s, even as it becomes increasingly AI-bloated and worthless.

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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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