The Steam player count has broken a significant milestone – topping ten million active in-game users for the first time to kick off 2023 in PC gaming with a bang. As everyone settles down to explore the games they bought in the Steam Christmas sale, the numbers on the Valve client continue to climb past pandemic peaks, showing that there’s an ever-growing appetite for the best PC games.
The player count record has been demolished over recent months and continues to climb, passing 32 million concurrent users alongside this milestone (meaning roughly two-thirds aren’t actively in-game but are still logged into Steam). PCGamesN explored how PC gaming is fueled by free games like CS:GO, Warzone 2 and PUBG: Battlegrounds. Recent success stories include the Among Us imposter Goose Goose Duck, and the ever-present Grand Theft Auto V as well as Call of Duty in its new form as Modern Warfare 2.
Tracking site SteamDB shows the lifetime concurrent users on Steam and reports January 7 at 1pm UTC (that’s 5am PT / 8am ET / 1pm GMT / 2pm CET) as the first time that more than ten million in-game users have been recorded simultaneously, clocking 10,016,459. That number has since gone up, and it’s likely we’ll only see more in coming weekends as the year progresses based on recent growth patterns.
Also seeing plenty of players still is FromSoftware’s grandest epic to date, Elden Ring, which took home the Steam Game of the Year award and saw its first-ever sale price during the holiday period, so there are likely plenty of players exploring the Lands Between for the first time. Elden Ring was also named the PCGamesN Game of the Year Top Ten for 2022.
There’s also likely to be many who got themselves a Steam Deck over the holidays, with Valve recently highlighting the most-played Steam Deck games for 2022. It’s a great time to be a Steam Deck owner, too as the latest Steam update contains some backend code strings suggesting we could see local file sharing on Steam for easy transfers between your Deck and PC.
If you’re one of those tens of millions of players, check out the best free games on PC for plenty of games to keep you busy as 2023 kicks off, along with our picks of the best upcoming PC games to look forward to as the year progresses.
