Steam, the biggest digital PC game retailer on the market, has reached another milestone in a year that has see some insane statistics in terms of people playing video games. Game Statistician Daniel Ahmad tweeted that the platform has seen the single largest amount of concurrent players on Christmas Day, topping out at an astounding 23 million users. To put that in perspective, the previous year Steam had 15.8 million concurrent players on Christmas day, a 7 million player difference and a ridiculous jump in numbers.
Due to the world wide effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic, a lot of people have suddenly found themselves playing video games a lot more than they were before. Steam in particular has been seeing a massive increase of people playing games on the platform, especially during their annual sales events. The most recent, and current one, the Winter Sale, started a few days before Christmas, and no doubt had a helping hand with the rise of people playing on that day. Ahmad also mentions that the games that were played the most during this day includes some heavy hitters such as Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, Dota 2, Grand Theft Auto V, and Cyberpunk 2077.
Cyberpunk 20777 in particular was one of the most anticipated games in history, and has since sold more than 13 million copies, with the majority of pre-orders going to the PC version. While the game is available on numerous platforms, it’s highly likely that the most of these PC orders were for the Steam version, helping the platform getting the aforementioned numbers for Christmas Day. Considering that the world will still be dealing with this pandemic, along with the ongoing sales on the platform, it’s safe to assume that Steam’s overall player base will probably increase going into 2021.