PC gaming is still immensely popular, and the proof of that can be seen in the figures for the number of players on Valve’s platform, Steam. Over the weekend, Steam once again broke the record for concurrent players, as it managed to reach an impressive 41,816,052 players at a single point in time. It is unclear when the next record will be set, but there is no doubt that it will not be long before the milestone of 42 million is overcome.
2025 was a huge year for Steam as in March 2025 it managed to break the 40 million concurrent player mark and reached a whopping 41.2 million players at once. Since then it flirted with higher numbers, especially in the autumn, where October and November brought peaks of 41.6 and 41.5 million players. Over the past few days, oddly enough not during the holiday period, but the first weekend after the New Year, it has seen another peak, peaking at 41.8 million players at once, the highest peak to date.
To show how big Steam is, at the time of writing around 30 million people play games on the platform, which is a huge number compared to the PlayStation 5, which is approaching 85 million console sales so far in its lifetime. Is PC gaming the king? It’s hard to say otherwise, but maybe the rapidly increasing prices of components like GPUs and RAM will change this in the future…
