Steam Has Already Set A New Concurrent Player Record, Clearing 42 Million

Just a week after its last record-setting day, Steam has hit a new concurrent player peak of 42,042,778, passing the 42 million milestone for the very first time on January 11. The gaming platform has seen sustained growth in recent years, with record-setting peaks happening more and more regularly.

Although Steam has been around for over 20 years, its popularity has picked up dramatically in recent years--especially in the six years since the Covid-19 pandemic was officially declared. Steam's average concurrent users have more than doubled since pre-Covid days, and its rate of growth has also sped up.

Analysis of Steam's growth by Wccftech shows that the platform's pre-Covid growth rate was around 4.5% per year, which rocketed to a massive 31.5% in 2020 due to global lockdowns, and later leveled out to around 13% in the years since. Wccftech reports that Steam's revenue is also on an upwards trend, with December 2025 being its best December yet for revenue--no doubt driven by recent breakout games including Arc Raiders and indie hit Peak.

Steam is easily ahead of competitor Epic Games Store, which has seen user growth due to free game giveaways, but has struggled to keep revenue trending in the same direction. Another gaming behemoth remains on top of Steam in peak concurrent users--Roblox, which set an all-time record of 47.3 million online players back in August, due to a viral face off between popular games Grow a Garden and Steal a Brainrot. Outside of this record-setting peak, Steam boasts a higher average concurrent player count than Roblox, which currently sits below 20 million according to stats tracker RoMonitor.

With new Valve hardware on the horizon, including the re-vamped Steam Machine and Steam Frame VR headset, it doesn't look like Steam's growth will be slowing down anytime soon.

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