Little-known, underground indie videogame platform Steam sure is doing well for itself. The service recently hit a new historical high of 41,666,455 players online at once, per the stoic record-keepers over at SteamDB. That's just a little over the population of Canada and a whole lot higher than the last time it graced our pages for breaking a concurrents record, which was last year when it hit a paltry, piddling, barely noticeable 35 million online users.
The new high score was hit, as you might expect, over a weekend. Last Sunday, to be precise: October 12, with a touch over 13 million players actually in-game. I'd venture to suggest that the release of Battlefield 6 had at least something to do with it. Last weekend was BF6's first, and with DICE's FPS currently a comfortable #14 on the Steam concurrent charts itself, there's likely some overlap there.
But it's also a more general testament to the growth of PC gaming in general. Back at the start of this year, a sweeping report on the "The State of Video Gaming in 2025" called our humble hobby "a bright spot" of continued growth amid an industry whose revenue was otherwise stagnant. "While console has stagnated since 2021," read the report," PC gaming revenue "has grown 20%."
Now, if I have one principle it's 'not caring about how much revenue my hobbies direct to capitalist pockets,' but the facts are the facts: PC as a gaming platform continues to grow and become more accessible, especially with the proliferation of handheld PCs like the Steam Deck.
With Steam being essentially synonymous with PC gaming and, let's be honest, pretty much the only videogame client that isn't a chore to use (but as ever, shoutout to GOG for letting me just download my installers), no wonder the platform's attracting increasingly nationstate-sized audiences online at any given hour.
I confess, it does make me a little nervous. As billionaires go, Gabe Newell seems like the one who has deep-fried his brain the least of all of 'em, and Steam in general has never really done me wrong. Nevertheless, it does feel like the platform's dominance represents all of us sticking our eggs in a single basket.
If Steam turned evil tomorrow, would I really be able to easily swap to something else and leave the friends and 1,000+ games I have on there behind? It seems unlikely. Hell, I still use Google because it's all I've used since the late '90s, even as it becomes increasingly AI-bloated and worthless.
