Steam reached new concurrent heights recently when it broke its previous record of active users who were all either playing games or browsing Steam at once.

Valve’s gaming platform has had a field day this year with new games like PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds lending a hand in the massive playercount, and all of that worked itself into a huge number of concurrent players that were online yesterday. Steam recently had 17,683,804 users online at one time, a ridiculously high number to now have as their record.

Of course, the massive amount of users was likely due in no small part to Black Friday. Not all of these users were actually in a game at the time – that peak number for the past few days came to just under 7 million active players – but both numbers are astonishing figures that most games and platforms dream of. If all of the sales went well for Valve and those users online actually followed through with their Black Friday intentions and purchased something, you can expect plenty of them to return and keep that user number fairly high for some time.

But while Black Friday might’ve brought in all the non-playing users who were scouring the Steam Store for discounts on their favorite games and DLC, one game mentioned previously did its part to retain the users who were actually playing games. PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds with its ever-growing number of players also raised its own bar after everyone must’ve decided that they needed to buy the game for the holidays. The battle royale game amassed just under 3 million users yesterday, missing the mark by a couple thousand active players. Compare that to how many active players there were that were actually taking part in games and you’ll see that PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds made up a fairly large portion of all the active users using Steam.

If this first sales-bringing holiday of the rest of the year is any indication, you can bet that Steam and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds will be looking forward to similar results as the year progresses and more players pick up games for themselves or as gifts.

Posted: Nov 27, 2017 9:54 am
Related Forum: PC Gaming Forum

Source: http://comicbook.com/gaming/2017/11/26/steam-concurrent-users-all-time-high-black-friday/