28,230,853 of us were on Steam at the same time earlier today

Oh look, it's happened again! Valve has once again broken its own record for the most concurrent users recorded on Steam.

The all-time peak now sits at 28,230,853 simultaneous players – an almost 10,000,000 increase from the long-standing record set in January 2018. The news was once again revealed by SteamDB, confirming that earlier today, over 28 million of us were logged into Steam at the same time.

As I reported last week – yes, this is beginning to feel like a weekly report at this point – Steam's records are typically broken during lockdown, or when a lot of us are off work or stuck at home, so – perhaps unsurprisingly – the records started piling up at the start of the pandemic back in early 2020. On February 2, 2020, Steam's then long-standing record of 18,537,490 users – set two years earlier in January 2018 – was surpassed, and setting a new record of 18,801,944 players. 

That record has been broken many times since then. Numbers breached 20 million for the first time in March 2020, and then 22 million just a week later. We saw 24.7 million users peak in December 2020, 26.5 million in February 2021, and 27.1 million concurrent users in November. This time last week, I reported that a new record of simultaneous users was set – 27,942,036 – and just seven days later, it's now happened again.

"Concurrent users saw strong growth during 2020, due to the impact of COVID-19, but it's clear that growth also continued to persist in 2021," tweeted industry analyst, Daniel Ahmad, reflecting on the game's industry steady growth.

If you're craving more Steam stats, Steam is back with its Best of 2021, detailing Steam's Top Sellers, Top New Releases, Most Played Games, Top Early Access Graduates, Top Selling VR Games, and Top Controller Games for 2021, Steam's Best of 2021 charts performance from January 1, 2021, to December 15, 2021.

This year, Dead by Daylight, Valheim, and New World join games like Battlefield 2042, Dota 2, and Destiny 2 as Steam's top-grossing games, as well as Naraka Bladepoint, Rainbow Six Siege, PUBG Battlegrounds, Apex Legends, CS:GO, and GTA 5 (of course).

And if you were wondering what games kept us glued until the end, it seems that more of us completed Resident Evil Village than any other game this year.

Looking for something new to get stuck into? Here are the best PC games right now.