Steam hit 17.5 million concurrent users yesterday—its best day ever

2017 has been a bumper year for Steam. In April, Valve revealed that the platform was peaking at an average of 14 million concurrent users per day, which seemed to me like an incomprehensibly large number. But it looks puny in comparison to the numbers it's pulling in nowadays.

Presumably Black Friday has something to do with that, and you won't be surprised to hear that the meteoric rise of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds was a big help. With nearly 3 million concurrent players yesterday, it made up a big chunk of the numbers. It won't be long until PUBG breaks through that 3 million mark for the first time. That's remarkable considering that in September everyone was making impressed noises when it broke the record for concurrent Steam users at 1.3 million.

For Steam, today wasn't quite so massive, but it still broke through the 17.5 million mark. It will likely die down after the weekend (weekdays are naturally quieter) but it wouldn't surprise me if it reaches 18 million within the next few weeks.

Thanks, PCGamesN, and SteamDB for the graph.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.