Many people used Valve’s digital store and service simultaneously as the entire population of Ghana, an African country…

In recent years, it has been common for Steam to be used by around 25 million people or more at a time. Slowly, gradually, that number started to get higher. Still, another milestone was reached with Gabe Newell’s service, which we would never have thought would get here after 18 years when Half-Life 2 was released in late 2004 (because at that time, the service was nowhere near its current size, and it was required to be installed to play the previously leaked Freeman story).

We have also heard two different figures for October 23. While Steam’s official statistics show 30 million 12,957 users online at any one time, SteamDB put it higher: they say the number was slightly higher (30 million 32,005, a difference of 17,048 users). It is also the result of the exponential growth seen mainly since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic.

It took Steam roughly 14 years to reach 15 million concurrent users in 2017, but from there, it only took them five years to double that figure (and from that, we can conclude that 45 million will be reached in less than half a decade). This rapid pace was already apparent last January, as Newell’s service reached 25 million users simultaneously after a bunch of records.

Steam is popular, no doubt about it (it has its rivals, such as GOG and the Epic Games Store), but there is a negative consequence: the service’s quality limits have been removed so that you can add almost anything, even an asset flip, for a small fee. There’s a solid draconian strictness for highly sexual games and products based on blockchain and NFTs, but beyond that, there is a sea of terrible “games” on Steam, and anyone can find one in a matter of moments.

Source: PCGamer