Only a few months after Steam first hit 36 million, the record has been broken again this year with Steam remaining the champion for PC gamers.
According to SteamDB, yesterday saw 37,266,324 concurrent users online with 12,534,703 actually in-game. Looking back through the history that makes it the 4th time this year that the record has been broken. We saw Steam hit 34, 35 and then 36 million all in a single month back in March so it took a bit longer this time.
Around the time Steam hit the new record the top games were:
- Black Myth: Wukong
- Counter-Strike 2
- Dota 2
- PUBG
- Banana
It's pretty clear that Black Myth: Wukong is really pushing the numbers there, itself hitting a peak concurrent player count of 2,068,291 in the last 24 hours and an all-time peak of 2,415,714 only 4 days ago. So it's doing really well, and has managed to become the second most-played game on Steam of all time just under PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS as per SteamDB.
Five years ago, Randy Pitchford of Gearbox predicted in a post on X/Twitter, that Steam "may look like a dying store":
I think it's pretty safe to say that's not going to happen.
Worth noting Pitchford did follow that post up recently when poked about Borderlands 4 coming to Steam:
Quoting: MacTavishAlthough I like Epic
May I ask what you like? It seems an unpopular opinion, but I'm open to your thoughts.
Quoting: AdutchmanI agree with the last tweet. If you look at Steam from a UX/UI standpoint, it's pretty bad because the core UI has not evolved significantly in years. And there's also the percentage question of course. If Epic would've put money into improving the actual store and Linjx support, they might have won me over. Shame really.
There is also ten times more features to fit in Steam compared to EGS. That's mainly the problem for competitors to Steam as I see it. How are they going to catch up? It's like an MMO trying to catch up to World of Warcraft. It's really, really hard and especially with Epics pace of innovation. It took EGS over three years to introduce the shopping cart; a revolutionary idea in 1995. Linux-support is pretty much at the bottom of the priority list xD No strike that it's not even on the list.
Last edited by Brokatt on 27 August 2024 at 6:56 am UTC
As for Randy last X/Twitter post, if there were Steam competitors during its infancy, then they would've had some good competition. However, these competitors that we have today came in after Steam had already established themselves as the de facto place to buy your PC games digitally. At the end, competition is still great as long as Valve isn't killing/buying them off one by one.
Last edited by ToddL on 27 August 2024 at 2:12 pm UTC
Quoting: AdutchmanI agree with the last tweet. If you look at Steam from a UX/UI standpoint, it's pretty bad because the core UI has not evolved significantly in years.Is there something inherently good about changing the core UI?
There are some things I'd like to see . . . for instance, it's basically a lot like a browser but it doesn't have tabs.
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