Steam Concurrent Users Pass 8.5 Million

Steam reached 8.5 million concurrent users on January 2, 2015. At about 11:10am on that day, Steam stats page reports that 8,500,345 concurrent users were logged in. The timezone is unclear but most likely it is PST seeing as Valve is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington. The previous Steam record was 8 million from June 29, 2014. Previous to that Steam reported 7.5 million concurrent users in December of 2013. A large majority of those users appeared to be playing Dota 2, as current reports indicate that 879,132 player were playing it at its peak just today, with the second game, Counter-Strike Global Offensive, trailing by 500,000 players. Steam also generally releases active user stats, which are the amount of accounts that have signed in recently and actually play/own games. That number was 100 million back in September of 2014.

Steam also announced that they have added 1,300 games in 2014 through to September, up from the 304 titles the year previous. This does cause some dissolution of quality as the mass quantity of games being released obscures that which is actually worth someone’s time and money. This is not helped by the Steam Early Access option which allows indie developers to release games in an unfinished state. As well as Steam Greenlight where projects are submitted and if they get enough votes are Greenlit and released on the Store. To combat this trend, Steam released a curation tool which allows popular users, such as YouTube Let’s Players and Gaming Industry people to curate a list of recommended titles. It is a way to sort through the crap to get at the good stuff being released. It has been 16 months since Valve first announced the Steam Machine concept, which was pushed back to 2015 in May of last year. Hopefully we get more information on when they will be released to the public at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week.