Either I'm experiencing deja vu, or Steam has somehow set another user count record only a month after the last one

PC gaming appears to continue to be as popular as ever, as Steam just hit a new concurrent user count record.

I feel like every time I like away from Steam for five minutes, it's setting a new record for the amount of players it has online at once. Valve started the year off by breaking its concurrent user count record (more than once) when more than 33 million users were online at once. In March that went up all the way to 36 million, then again to 37 million in August, and now, just under an hour ago at the time of writing, Steam managed to hit a concurrent user count record of 38,367,277, a very strong number for the video game distribution platform (via SteamDB). It should be noted that doesn't mean over 38 million people were playing games at the same time, it's just how many people were logged in at once.

Still, it's a clear sign that PC gaming is growing more and more, particularly in an era where console makers are trying to flog $700 consoles at us for ever-so-slightly sharper looking background models that most people wouldn't have thought twice about (sorry to those of you that make those kind of models, you do really good work, I just don't need it to be crystal clear quality). It's unclear why this random weekend in September has people wanting to play some video games (though the weather is a bit grey again over here in the UK), but I'm sure that doesn't matter to Valve.

Things just generally seem to be going well for Valve at the minute too, as its latest game, Deadlock, is still doing very well on Steam. Earlier this month, the game hit a player-count peak of 171,490, and right now there's almost 150,000 people playing, so Valve is likely in for more continued success.