This past weekend, Steam managed to break its concurrent user record not once, but twice. Each of these record-breaking days saw Steam reach over 27 million concurrent users.
On Saturday at 9 AM ET, Valve's long-running online game service managed to reach an all-time high of 27,182,165 concurrent players. Not content to break their record once, Steam managed to break it again the very next day at the same time with 27,384,959 players, about 1.5 million more people than the population of Australia. Of these players, 7.8 million were marked as actively playing video games at the time.
There are plenty of factors that have helped create this record-breaking number of players. Thanksgiving weekend is often a time where people take it easy after one of the year's major year-end holidays. In addition, Steam is currently holding its big Autumn Sale which started on November 24th, and many other retailers are holding Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals that lead to major gaming discounts. This upward trend in Steam's user base has been going on for nearly two years now ever since governments around the world have been warning their people to isolate and lockdowns begun due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Ever since the pandemic got into full swing, Steam has regularly seen daily peaks that have rarely dipped below 20 million players, and last weekend has marked its highest point during the pandemic.
The Steam Autumn Sale is still going and will end on December 1st.