Comfort games: Gamers are flocking to tried and true staples during these uncertain times. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, a game originally launched in 2012, is by far the most popular title on the platform with more than a million players as of writing. Dota 2, which dropped in mid-2013, ranks second with nearly 750,000 concurrent players followed by PUBG with around 560,000 active gamers. Grand Theft Auto V and Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege round out the top five.
Valve's Steam platform for the third time in as many weekends has set a new concurrent user record as social distancing measures due to Covid-19 force additional people to stay indoors and find alternative ways to entertain themselves.
As of this writing, Steam has 23,392,298 users on its platform. Before the Coronavirus-induced rally, the most users that Steam ever had logged in at once was 18.8 million on February 2, just before the Super Bowl.
That changed two weekends ago when 20,313,476 concurrent users hit the system on March 15. A week later, the record was broken again when more than 22 million players were on Steam at the same time.
Some are no doubt wondering where the ceiling is for concurrent Steam users. That's a tough question to answer and one that'll depend almost entirely on how the situation around Covid-19 continues to play out. Confirmed cases in the US continue to climb according to data from the CDC, suggesting we are further from a resolution than we are the start of it. In all likelihood, additional social distancing restrictions are expected.
If I had to guess, Steam will continue to set new concurrent user records in the coming weeks.
Masthead credit: Gorodenkoff