Steam breaks two all-time user records in one weekend

January 7-8 saw Valve’s Steam platform break records for both the highest number of concurrent players in-game, as well as the highest number of concurrent users online on the platform.

The details:

• At 14:00 UTC on January 7, SteamDB reported that a total of 10,082,055 users were currently in-game on Steam, the first time 10 million in-game players had been reached in the platform’s near 19-year existence. On the following day, SteamDB showed that the record was yet again broken, with 10,284,568 players in-game at 13:00 UTC.
• On January 8, it was also highlighted by SteamDB that the record for the number of concurrent users online using Steam had been broken with a peak of 33,078,963. The time of the peak was 14:00 UTC, just one hour after the in-game record had been achieved. The previous record for active users was set in October 2022, with 30,029,229 players logged in and using the service.
• The classic games Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) and Dota 2, as well as the battle royale games PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) and Apex Legends, were all in the list of the top games being played at the time the records were being set.
• Goose Goose Duck, a free-to-play, multiplayer social deduction game similar to the enormously popular Among Us, stood out among the expected entries in the charts. The game has recently seen a huge increase in players, largely thanks to BTS member V playing the game with fans during a live stream.

Other Steam/Valve news:

• Valve’s Steam Deck might be receiving an update that allows users to transfer games to and from other PCs and Steam Decks on their local networks. Twitter user @thexpaw spotted strings of code added in the latest Steam update that seemingly confirm this rumor. For now, Steam Decks users will need to continue downloading their games directly from Steam’s servers over Wi-Fi, a much slower experience, especially for larger titles.
• In an interview with The Verge, Steam Deck designer, Pierre-Loup Griffais mentioned that Valve is paying more than 100 open-source developers to work on Steam Deck’s software, as well as Steam for Linux and ChromeOS. Griffais added that the collection of developers is part of "a larger strategy to coordinate all these projects and set up kind of an overall architecture" to get PC technology running in a Linux environment.
• On January 4, a SteamDB listing for "Valve Event Upload" was spotted, with very little information to go with it. One thing stood out about the listing, and that was the inclusion of a config file, something that only Valve themselves can create. @thexpaw on Twitter once again used their knowledge to shut down the speculation, pointing out it was an appid for cloud storage that only works for Valve and store promotion groups. It looks like we aren’t getting Half-Life 3 or a new Portal game anytime soon, sadly!