Steam launched in 2003 — and as recently as 2015, its record for concurrent users logged into the service was 10 million people, reports Kotaku (growing to 14 million in 2017, and by March of 2020, rising up to 20 million).
But now it’s jumped another 50% — just two and a half years:
We got to 28 million users earlier this year — more than the entire populations of countries like Australia and Taiwan — and now, in late October, we’ve hit the nice round number of 30 million, with the peak number of users logged on earlier today standing at 30,032,005.
Note that this isn’t the number of people playing at any one time, just the number of people logged into the platform, a feat that’s often achieved simply by turning your PC on. If you want to know the number of users actually in a game at that time, SteamDB figures put the peak at around 8.5 million, which is still an enormous figure, and a big jump (proportionally) even from earlier in 2022, when the highest number of active players stood at “between seven and eight million”.
