Gaming platform Steam has started 2024 off with a bang, the popular PC-friendly service breaking its all-time player count record.
Steam is one of the biggest gaming platforms of all time, bringing in millions upon millions of players with its extensive variety of content and major releases. For smaller devs, Steam is a place to release early access versions of upcoming games to help get player feedback and tweak features ahead of a full release.
For bigger AAA titles, Steam is often seen as the go-to platform for PC gamers, with yearly sales typically a time for fans to pick up some of the biggest games for a fraction of the full price.
While the platform has always brought in impressive numbers, Steam has started 2024 off with a bang. Breaking its record for the highest number of logged-in concurrent users with a massive 33,675,229. This number surpassed the previous record that was set in March of 2023.
As well as this, Steam also broke another record for the number of users actively engaging in gameplay, hitting a new high of 10,837,140 concurrent players.
It is unclear what has prompted such a giant surge in gamers to log onto Steam. With no major releases dropping over Christmas, gamers are speculating that this increase in player count could simply be due to many having time off work over the New Year break as well as the recently released Steam Deck increasing in sales numbers over the Christmas period.
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A game that has found major player numbers for the first time in years is Monster Hunter World, the game also breaking records for its concurrent player count since 2021.
Given this, there is a chance that this game, as well as the aforementioned factors, could be playing major roles in the giant spike in gamers jumping on Steam.
Regardless, these two record breaking achievements from Steam promise a big 2024 for the company.
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