Steam has hit several records in 2020so far. In all, more than 20 million users were online yesterday, and 6 million of those were playing.
Discover our latest podcast
Coronavirus is to blame
An upward trend could already be observed last week. Italy, Spain, Belgium... several countries have ordered their residents to stay at home to try to slow the spread of the COVID-19 virus. And despite it having been a sunny weekend, a lot of gamers decided to indulge in their favourite activity...
As a result, the game's first player record was broken on Saturday, then topped on Sunday. Among the 20 million players online (almost as many people as the population of Australia), more than 6 million were playing. Servers had to take on quite the load, but no issues were reported. Conversely, for consoles, Xbox servers also recorded large peaks on player counts, which became problematic...
CSGO in the lead, GTA and DOTA catching up
Of course, most players rushed to play the most popular games. CSGO is in the lead and broke its own record for simultaneous players (more than 1 million!), while DotA 2 and PuBG are following close behind. GTA 5 and Rainbow Six Siege are in the TOP 5.
These big video game audience records started in February, in China, the country that was hit the hardest and quickly made arrangements for quarantine. Tencent, the undisputed leader of the gaming world in China, had observed a huge load on its servers, especially for Honor of Kings, and had to give out free skins to its players to apologize for the slowdowns... In conclusion: gamer friends, get on Steam so you can start collecting free bonuses!
