You are correct in that it is peak, but the peaks did not happen at the same time.  There are currently 310,00 people playing the top games online.  And I never stated what peak meant.  I apologize.

Read above. Jagged linked to numbers for today only. Steam doesn't offer comprehensive stats. All they offer is daily figures.

Oh. Thanks.

@ Jagged do you really believe that there are 310K people playing games on XBL right now when the entire service's peak was 2.2 million even online the week after xmas?

And as a side note the people in my friends list are often not playing games at all, but, like myself, either on netflix or browsing the marketplace. I remember yesterday I had 5 friends online (6 including me) and only one person was in-game. The others were just listed as "Xbox Live" or "Netflix."

Yes, Halo 3 routinely did 500,000 people concurrently before CoD4 MW2 came out. CoD4 MW is doing better than Halo 3. So yes. I have posted several times where the Halo 3 current player count was more than the top 75 games on Steam in the past.

I did not ask if you thought Xbox Live could beat those numbers. I'm sure Steam has been signifficantly higher than that on multiple occasions. I asked if you belived there were more online right now. I dont have either Call of Duty on 360 but I do have Halo 3 and ODST and would be happy to check those multiplayer numbers....

Maybe we should post the numbers on at peak time (For both US and Europe on a weekend) instead. Then we'd have a pretty good idea of the numbers for Steam.

As someone who plays L4D2 pc on a regular basis, I would say the daily peak is around 25k daily +/- 3k. It indicates how many people are currently playing when you go in game.

Which means I was pretty much bang on with my estimate :)

Halo 3 has gone down significantly.  ODST never put up good numbers.  Steam numbers pretty much stay the same all day.  Believe me, I have checked.  You would need to log into CoD4 to really see.  I can do that when I go to lunch I guess.