Steam surpasses 37 million concurrent users for the first time ever thanks to Black Myth: Wukong

Steam has surpassed 37 million concurrent users for the first time in its history: That's 37,242,724 people connected to Valve's digital distribution platform at the same time.

The new record, set on August 25, represents a sharp climb in concurrent users since the beginning of 2024, when the new year ushered in a new concurrent user record of nearly 33.7 million. The number of people actually in a game concurrently has seen a comparable pop, according to SteamDB, from 10.8 million when that January record was set to more than 12.5 million at the time of this newest record.

Steam is a very reliable "number go up" operation as a regular thing but even so, this particular peak coming in the later days of summer—not exactly a time of peak gaming interest, I don't think—is interesting. The peak concurrent user count sailed past 36 million back in March and came oh-so-close to break 37 million in June, before sidling back down to mid-34 million peaks through most of July.

It's always fun to speculate about the reasons behind Steam's concurrent user peaks: Sometimes it's the holiday season, sometimes it's shitty weather, and sometimes it's a really big game. Most of the credit for surpassing the big Three-Seven, I think, has to go to Black Myth: Wukong, which launched on Steam on August 19 and quickly powered its way to the top of the charts, becoming the second-most played Steam game of all time. Its peak concurrent player count of more than 2.4 million crushed previous records held by games including Palworld, CS:GO, and Lord Ark, and now stands second only to PUBG Battlegrounds.

Those numbers are a clear reflection of the importance of China to Steam's future growth, and I have no doubt we'll be seeing more of it, driven by new Chinese blockbusters, in the future. Is a new record of 40 million concurrent users possible by the end of 2024? At this point, I would not bet against it.