"A lot of you are gaming hard, it seems. Steam has been on a steady growth trajectory for years now, with the Covid pandemic alone adding five million unique users only in 2020. On 1th January, Valve's platform crossed the 42 million barrier, setting a new record.

As reported and explained by Wccftech, the PC distribution platform has now more than doubled its concurrent user average since 2020, with new record peaks of activity becoming more and more common in recent years. The previous activity record was 41.6 million users in October 2025."

Great news for Steam, hopefully this means it will continue to get Sony first title games.  Personally, I would love to see Astro and Yotei gets ports, the latter I suspect is a given at some point.  Kudos to Steam, hell of a business strategy.  

It's crazy that Steam continues to peak its previous record each month it seems

Always wondered what the concurrent in-game users are. Most of the time I'm logged into steam I'm not gaming, it just autostarts with my laptop and pc lol.

You can get info like that from sites like SteamDB.

Currently, a little under 10 million are in-game.

I'm guessing Asia, India and China in particular are driving the growth.



However this is odd:

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/steam-users-by-country

Crazy to see India with 854 million steam users, that's over half of the total population.

Which actually leads me to severely question those numbers....


AI contradicts itself (not surprising)

853.8 million Steam users as of 2024, making it the country with the largest user base.

Steam sales man....

I think I bought like handfull of games on Epic Games store.... but I have like ~150 games there (most were given free).
I barely even use it, I just login, claim free games, log out. I don't even play them.... and I'm starting to feel bad about it
(ei. I feel like I'm taking advantage of epic).

I have abit more games on steam, but like every one of them is bought there.
Granted alot of them are from those steam sales.
Once things reach 50% off... or like 80% off... yep, time to buy it.

I have a backlog so big I don't even worry about getting Day1 games, unless I want to specifically support the devs for doing something above and beyound.

Do people actually do that?

I turn off all unnecessary applications and services, and kill background programs (when not in use).
That is the only reason I can idle and have windows11 take up like 3.4gb of ram and like ~110 process threads. 
You let everything just run... before you know it, all your memory is eaten up by bloatware and unnecessary programs.

Steam sales and free online is my main driver. I got the RE remakes last year for something like $4 each, lol.

It does it automatically after you install Steam, you have to turn auto start off and most people don't bother.

3.4GB? groan, I used to have XP running with less than 200 MB of RAM in use. Currently 10 GB in use which is mostly Firefox :/ (But got 32GB ram so no issue)

I only have 16gb on this system... So with like this page open, and like 3 youtube video tabs,.... I'm at like 5,6gb used.
So even with you using 10 GB, you still have more to "spend" than I do.

I just made it a habit to turn everything unnecessary off.
I feel exactly the same way (its too big, uses too much ram).

Heck I remember there were competitions about "slim" versions of windows 98/xp,
and people could get windows to take up less than 300mb (the install size on your HDD).   

Now windows 11 is like ~50GB on your SSD.
Is windows 50-100 times better than it used to be?  

I have another system with a 7800xt, and I'm tempted to install Mint/CachyOS/SteamOS sometimes.... but never seem to get around to it.
I heard it is so much less system demanding that even with the overhead of using translation/emulation software to run app's (like steam's proton),
it can sometimes beat windows in games performance (esp. on amd gpu systems).  I think the change just scares me too much, windows "works".

Actually, I only have 5-6 GB left before Windows starts page swapping, which is what slows everything down. Stupid OS starts doing that when half the physical RAM has been used. Actually I already have 1.1 GB paged, since Windows also has 10GB cached.

But as long as more than half is still available (cached pool doesn't count) it only pages out unused stuff. (I see no hard faults reported in the resource monitor)

When I was on XP my laptop only had 1 GB of RAM, so it was out necessity to get it running as lean as possible. Still kinda ridiculous how much memory FireFox uses. 


Anyway I only start Steam nowadays when my kid wants to buy something for his account. I did reconfigure Steam to use less RAM when I was playing FS2020 and needed all the memory possible. Can't turn it off while playing FS2020 even though all Steam hosts is the launcher doh.