Steam just hit over 40 million concurrent users (peak)

https://steamdb.info/app/753/charts/

This is around double of what the concurrent count was about this time in the year 5 years ago

Good to see PC gaming grow strongly

It’s amazing how big Steam has gotten by just existing lol. You’re never going to find any marketing or anything that the likes of Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo need to spend to get word out about their hardware or games. You’ll never find Steam marketing rights to major third party games. Players literally just go to Steam.

A good product sells itself.
Doesn't hurt they where first to market, and have the good of the gamer at heart (valve/steam do some proactive stuff to protect consumers).
Like the store front is so well done, most won't even use another, if they give out free games from time to time.
Its like the direct opposite situation of the windows store. People actively avoid buying certain games, mainly because of the store.

At this point, I have like 100+ steam games and the same on Epic game store.
However almost all epic games where free gifts, and tbh I rather play on steam (if I have the same game both places).

All it took for me was to buy Gears of War 1 Remasters yrs ago on Win store to realise I would never want to buy from MS on their storefront ever again. Could not mod the game, worse off performance, and it was also locked away in a folder on my own desktop that I couldn't even tweak/modify. 

Also tried to gift someone Minecraft Bedrock, so they could play with me, MS took my money, but didn't give me the code, and this happened twice, and because it was digital, they wouldn't offer me any such refund, so I felt cheated to fuck. At that point I just outright didn't like MS when it come to their services/storefront business. This is also why I won't touch GP or the "xbox app", not when I have Steam. 

Steam just does everything I want it to for the most part. Lets me customise my profile, let's me sort who can/cannot see what games I have, or access to my profile. I can block certain devs/publishers, games I do not wish to see. I can sort out what tags I prefer to see more games that I may like, etc. Also Steam having build in mod support is really nice, and I can customise their in-game overlay to what I want/do not want to see.

Every other storefront client on PC is just decades behind, and none of them really bother, nor desire to catch up to what Valve toiled away towards. I know to them it doesn't "make money", but it does in fact earn you favour and mindshare, which can eventually lead to possible profit, but the CEO's and those in charge of the clients simply do not see it that way. 

Also a recent example. Valve/R* are allowing users to pre-load GTA V enhanced on Steam. Epic to this day still doesn't allow you to pre-load on their own client, and because most EGS users do not know this info to this day, and because they have no EGS forums like Steam has, these users then come all the way to post on the GTA V Steam forums to ask if EGS will allow for pre-load, and that to me is just so god damn sad to see...

Helps that the market is different from a decade or so ago.

-China opening up to Steam moreso than previous years
-PC market blew up in Japan as consoles became less popular and the mobile market being at the same place its been
-Some markets such as in South America where they have been affected by high costs for consoles and the games for the consoles, made people jump into PC gaming.
-The fact that you have a large library of games that Steam always had and the constant releases from Japan now alongside Sony + Microsoft first party titles coming helped a lot too.
-You can use several different controllers natively through Steam like the Switch pro controller, PS5 Dualsense, Xbox Series Controller and numerous other third party controllers alongside the usual M/K combo.
-Various social aspects such as trading cards, steam market, etc added throughout the years helped it too
-Consistent updates and add-ons such as the most recent built in recorder
-The introduction to mobile PCs such as Steam Deck and others helped.

And the fact that you can have any type of PC to be able to play the thousands of games, you dont need the most powerful quad digit PC.

Highly recommend Steam especially since you can get great bundles from Humble and Fanatical - which can lead to having a common first world problem like this....(lol)

Wilds just got it over the edge it seems. Considering the MAU was about 130m back in 2021 that should be about 200m by now so the growth of Steam the past several years has truly been massive. It took till it was 16.5 years old to get to 20m but it's already doubled that in just another 5 years with growth in 2024 alone only being matched by 2020 so Steam just had a contender for its best year ever without a major pandemic significantly boosting things so the platform is truly in an incredible place currently.

Considering it gets almost everything other than Nintendo games now and is a fantastic platform to use in general it's no wonder people have been flocking to it lately. I wonder if it'll ever reach 100m concurrent users and while Steam is the biggest part of PC gaming it's by no means the only one so PC gaming as a whole is truly taking off which is great to see. Also for consoles only Nintendo has had huge growth the past few years and even that's been starting to stagnate recently so PC could end up being the only one to have major growth over the next 5-10 years.

Yep. I've been keeping track while I keep track of how some games are doing and watching the free to play games just balloon in size tells me people are hurting financially around the world but still wanna play games. Counter strike 2 is pulling in crazy numbers along with DOTA2, doing better than ever.

Steam was the real winner this generation..