Despite all of the talk about the death of PCs and the rise of mobile, PC gaming is still going strong, very strong actually. Steam, by far the most popular digital distribution service for video games on PCs, reached 8.5 concurrent users at the start of the year, a massive increase from the year prior, and doesn’t look like it’ll be slowing anytime soon.
Valve began 2015 in style, hitting a new record high for Steam with 8.47 million concurrent users on Jan. 1, according to the service’s stats page. A graph on the page shows a peak of 8,466,441 concurrent users at 12:01 p.m. yesterday. (It’s unclear what time zone the graph is using; we’ve reached out to Valve for clarification, and will update this article with any information we receive.) You can see a screenshot below of the graph with the peak marked. Steam first hit 8 million concurrent users on June 29, 2014, the encore day of the year’s Steam Summer Sale. The service topped 7.5 million back in December 2013, shortly after Christmas.
