Steam Officially Sets New Player Record

2 hours ago 6

Published Oct 12, 2026, 11:20 AM EDT

Elijah is a freelance news writer at Polygon. He was an associate editor at The A.V. Club and Paste, and has been featured in outlets like Game Informer, Fanbyte, Unwinnable, and more. He loves media in all forms, from fighting games and horror flicks to slow cinema and visual novels. He's from the Greater Boston area.

The ongoing hardware crisis doesn't seem to be hurting Steam's popularity

While the game console business has seen better days, Steam seems to keep booming. SteamDB shows that Valve’s digital storefronthit a new concurrent player record on Sunday, with more than 43.5 million users. Of those, over 14 million were in-game at the same time, which was also a record. This marks the second time the platform has surpassed its own peak this year, after previously hitting 42 million concurrents in January.

Steam’s player count has risen consistently over its 23-year history, but it hit a major bump in early 2020 after the World Health Organization declared the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Impressively, it has grown steadily since then, with its concurrent peak nearly doubling over the last six years.

What games helped drive the new record?

As for the games that helped drive Steam to its latest milestone, the most played games from this weekend include many of the usual suspects: Counter-Strike 2 (1.4 million 24-hour peak), Dota 2 (1 million), and PUBG: Battlegrounds (713,683) round out the top three. As for newcomers, the MMO Aion 2 fully launched on Oct. 5 and has hit an impressive peak of 397,905 players since then. Meanwhile, another Valve-developed game, Deadlock, landed in the top 10 again, hitting an all-time high of 262,145 concurrent players following its Sept. 30 patch. Given that Deadlock isn’t officially out yet, that's quite an impressive figure.

Beyond these major traffic drivers, it has been a jam-packed couple of months for game releases, with lots of great single-player games like Star Wars Galactic Racer, Ace Combat 8, and many more.

While the PC market continues to grow, game console sales have been in quite a rut. An ongoing shortage of RAM and other hardware parts has raised console prices and reduced sales. According to Circana, Xbox hardware sales were down 33% year-to-date in August compared to this point in 2025, while PlayStation sales have dropped 25% over the same period.

It’s a bit surprising that Steam’s numbers haven't been visibly affected by these hardware trends, as computer part prices have been soaring for the last few years, with graphics cards and other components proving hard to come by. It's possible that users are simply sticking with computers they've had since before the hardware crisis, but regardless, Valve seems to be weathering the storm.

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