Steam started the new year with a new player record. 4 days after New Year’s Eve, the corks must have been popping at Valve again.
What has Steam achieved? On January 4, 2026, Valve’s platform broke its own record with 41,916,052 simultaneously logged-in users. This was accompanied by the highest recorded number of players actually in-game on SteamDB, with 13,399,958 gamers playing at the peak on Steam, about 32% of the logged-in users.
Those who weren’t gaming were probably busy snatching up last-minute bargains during the current winter sale. Currently, the game of the year on Steam is available for under 16 euros.
One of the games that significantly contributed to the player numbers on Steam over the holidays was ARC Raiders:
Steam has been growing steadily for years
What’s so exciting about it? During Christmas and New Year, many people had time off, so there was plenty of time to game and shop on Steam. Therefore, the new user record is probably not too surprising. However, the data from SteamDB shows that the platform’s success is not just a one-time exception.
In fact, the number of simultaneous users on Steam has been steadily increasing since around 2008, and it is growing faster and faster. In March 2020, when the WHO declared the COVID-19 pandemic, the platform recorded a sudden increase, with 23.5 million users logged in simultaneously. In April, the number even climbed to 24.5 million.
To reach this point, the platform needed almost 17 years. However, in the past nearly 6 years, the peak number of simultaneous active users has almost doubled again. In March 2025, precisely 5 years after the COVID peak, Steam broke the 40 million threshold of simultaneous users for the first time.
This is remarkable, considering that gaming has actually been in a severe crisis for years.
How successful Steam is compared to other platforms is hard to say, as comparable stores do not have such data available. The closest contender is actually Roblox, which, with a peak of 47.3 million simultaneous players, even surpasses Steam. The platform is extremely popular among children, but also controversial: Russian children want to leave their country because they are no longer allowed to play Roblox
