Valve starts the year off strong as Steam breaks its concurrent user record yet again

It's the first weekend of the year, and everyone's playing games it seems, as Steam has just seen a new all-time user peak.

As spotted over on Resetera, a couple of hours ago Steam hit a new all-time concurrent user record about a couple of hours ago (at the time of writing), a whopping figure of 33,675,229 players. To be clear, that's just players logged in to Steam, not necessarily actually in-game. Funnily enough, though, Steam actually broke that record yesterday, with 10,837,140 players actually playing something, an equally impressive figure.

The previous concurrent record for players just logged in was back in March 2023, just under 100,000 less than today's record, so it's quite the increase. Why this weekend of all weekends there are so many people sign-in to Steam is anyone's guess, though my own would be that with most people back at work being reminded of the stresses of everyday life, the gamers amongst us needed to unwind that little bit more than usual. There's also all those new Steam Decks that Santa would have handed out over Christmas too, which will likely have helped deliver the record.

While it's unlikely to have encouraged this many more players to log in than normal, Steam has also introduced the ability to hide which games are in your library through the service's beta client. That's right, you no longer have to be embarrassed that you added Overwatch to your Steam library anymore!

The Steam Awards results were also revealed earlier this week, with Starfield taking home the "most innovative gameplay" award for some reason, something that even baffled the game's fans. Game of the year went to Baldur's Gate 3 to the surprise of no one, and the surprise indie hit Lethal Company took home the cutely named "better with friends" award.