Steam Reaches New Milestone of Over 42 Million Concurrent Users

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Steam, the most popular digital store for PC games, continues to grow its user base. Recent data from SteamDB shows a new peak of 42 million players online at the same time. This reflects a consistent pattern of growth for the platform since it first launched in the early 2000s.

The graph shows Steam was already growing steadily, but the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 significantly boosted that growth. With people staying home during lockdowns, gaming became much more popular, and Steam was a major beneficiary. Currently, Steam has around 30 million users online, and user numbers have leveled off somewhat.

Steam has been steadily gaining users for years. Back in 2013, it had 6.6 million people playing at the same time, which was a massive 300% increase from the year before.

Currently, free-to-play games like Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, and PUBG: Battlegrounds are the most popular choices among millions of players. While you’ll find paid games further down the list, titles like ARC Raiders, Grand Theft Auto 5 Enhanced, and Stardew Valley are also being played. The newest release appearing in the top played games is Elden Ring: Nightreign, currently at number 22, followed by Battlefield 6 at number 28.

As we move into January 2026, looking back at the last two months of 2025 shows that Embark Studios’ ARC Raiders was the best-selling game. Other popular titles during that period included the award-winning Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Dispatch, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2.

Steam has become increasingly popular not only because of its frequent sales, but also due to Valve consistently adding new features. These improvements include convenient cloud saves, family accounts with game sharing options, broad compatibility with controllers and other devices thanks to Steam Input, and easy access to game modifications through Steam Workshop.

Valve is attracting more users with the popular Steam Deck, and they’re expected to gain even more when the Steam Machine launches. Announced recently, the Steam Machine is a pre-built gaming PC designed to run Valve’s SteamOS, using a custom AMD processor and graphics card. It will run on Linux. Alongside the Steam Machine, Valve also revealed the Steam Frame, a VR headset that can stream games from your computer, even if those games aren’t designed for VR. You can find all the details about these new devices here.

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2026-01-12 14:44