Number of concurrent Steam users passes 18 million, 30% more than a year ago

More than 18 million people were logged into Steam at the same time yesterday, and more than seven million of them were in-game—both new records. Those are pretty abstract, albeit impressive, numbers, but if you compare it to this time last year then you'll see the number of concurrent Steam users has shot up by about 30%. That's a hell of a year for Valve.

Most of the growth happened in the second half of 2017, as you can see by the graph below. In April Shaun was impressed about Steam pulling in 14 million peak users a day. That seems like a long time ago. It reached 15 million in September, 16 million in October, and 17 million in November. Yesterday it peaked at just above 18.5 million, so that growth is showing no signs of slowing down. At this rate, it should reach 20 million before April.

Having seven million of those players in-game is also mighty impressive, and Valve can probably thank PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds for that. PUBG reached its all-time peak yesterday with 3.16 million players in-game, which means it accounted for just under half of all in-game players. That's popularity for you.

You can click through the graphs on SteamDB if you want to dive into the stats in more detail. How high do you think the numbers will go?

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.