Steam Achieves Highest Player Count Ever With 40 Million Concurrent Users

On March 2, 2025, Steam hit 40 million concurrent users, the highest it has ever been since its inception in 2003. This information was first spotted by SteamDB, a site that monitors the analytics of games available on Steam.

SteamDB posted the milestone on BlueSky and also mentioned that 12.6 million of those users were in-game at the time. Before this, Steam reached 30 million concurrent users in October 2022 and 39 million concurrent users in December 2024. According to Steam, its top new release of October 2022 was Persona 5 Royal which had more than 35,000 players at its release. However, the most played games during that time was Dota 2 and Counter-Strike 2 which both had 1 million players peak in that month.

In December 2024, the top played game was still Counter-Strike 2 which peaked at 1.7 million players in that month, a hundred thousand away from its all-time peak. This was followed by PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS which peaked at 799,077 in December 2024. PUBG’s all-time peak was 3.2 million which is still the highest player peak in Steam history.

But in March 2025, while Counter-Strike 2 still leads the pack, Monster Hunter Wilds is following very closely. The latter has achieved more than 1.3 million players at its release day. It currently holds the fifth highest all-time peak on Steam.

Steam is a digital storefront for PC developed by Valve. The storefront was launched in September 2003 and has evolved to what gamers know now. According to an article by DemandSage, Steam holds 75% of the U.S. market share for PC games.