A sign that Steam as a release platform and store continues to grow, over the weekend two big concurrent user records were totally smashed.
When it comes to concurrent users online on Steam at any one time, the record has been broken multiple times over this year, most likely boosted by the numbers of people staying at home due to the COVID19 pandemic. Around 20 hours ago Steam hit a new peak of 24,804,148 people.
Looking over SteamDB, the lifetime concurrent users on Steam shows pretty clear growth. You can also see the clear surge in April, dipping down in August and now surging again:
The other record that was smashed across this weekend is players actually in game. For the first time, ever, Steam had over 1 million players in 2 games at the same time. This was Cyberpunk 2077 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, both rather different games making it clear that singleplayer and online multiplayer can existing together peacefully. Well, sort of anyway, until you look at the rest of the top most played games on Steam being multiplayer titles too.
I actually thought there were more games that hit 1 million together before, but nope, this was a first.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
slaapliedje Dec 17, 2020
To be fair, if you're a programmer and you get hired on at Facebook at this point in time, you know what you're getting into. If you had started out there and thought the vision for the company sounded great and then you just got so involved in it and the years had passed you by, I could still kind of see how you'd have this 'vision' of what it was supposed to be and feel you could make a better difference to the direction from within. So yeah there could still be some 'good' people there. Or maybe they indoctrinated their coders like Scientologists do and they are just too afraid to leave!Behind every heartless corporation is of course the actual developers who are people who are generally very creative and are creating worlds for us to run around in and find bugs and complain about and mod and overall enjoy. Sure CDPR is a very wealthy corporation that is that way because of some very successful games. So yeah, the heart and soul of the coders is still there. The crunch time is because games that are this huge need deadlines or it would probably never be releases, and you know... people need to get paid.Do you think the same of every corporation? How about Facebook developers? Or maybe EA and Ubisoft? Should we worry about their "heart and soul" when we complain about their business practices? After a point, there's a clear separation between employees and management, and my criticism was clearly aimed at the people making the business decisions.
I'm not sending hate mail to their technical support, you know, or claiming that their programmers and artists are to blame. I'm not that silly. I simply don't buy stuff I don't want to support. And I do avoid supporting companies who take advantage of their employees and/or customers.
Regardless, it generally isn't the coders and such that are the 'evil' ones, but the upper management that generally have no clue, and only see $$$. Cyberpunk 2077 is clearly a work of love and they really tried to do a great job of getting the genre correct and following the RPG it's based upon. Just like the Witcher Series seems (I haven't read the books) to be a labor of love to put in all the little details into it.
Look at Croteam, you know there was someone there that had a love of Linux, so they started porting all of their games over to Linux. But then something happened to that employee, and now Serious Sam 4 was not released for Linux. That doesn't mean the programmers didn't necessarily want to not support Linux, they just decided based on time and being able to get it done or not. That still makes some of the more vocal Linux people get all pissed off and claim they'll never bother supporting them again, etc. This is the wrong way to do it. People just need to simply let them know that it's a shame that they're not releasing for Linux, and simply not buy the game. The messed up thing is there is no standard that people follow here, and simply buy Cyberpunk because it's THE game that everyone wants right now.
Yeah, I agree with all of this. Doesn't have much to do with what I said before, or with how a larger and more corporate game dev like CDPR works. Or at least it didn't. Don't know how Devolver's recent acquisition of Croteam changes things, but I doubt it's still nearly at the same level. Anyway, I'm not one of the people who gets pissy at developers when they don't support Linux, so you're barking up the wrong tree there. I bought and enjoyed Witcher 2 on Linux BTW, and I'd very much love to see Talos Principle 2 some day.Yeah, I wasn't particularly saying you were. Just pointing out what happened.
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