Some people are worried about how they’re going to stay sane during a prolonged period of federally-recommended social isolation. Then there are video game players, many of whom see this as an opportunity.
According to the independently-run SteamDB, the online digital games marketplace Steam had an all-time peak number of users online during the weekend of March 14, hitting a high of 20.3 million simultaneous players on the afternoon of March 15. This is a new record over the previous high of around 19 million, which was only achieved about a month ago.
In fairness, when you look at the numbers, roughly 15 million of those users simply had the Steam application open, whether they were shopping, using the chat application, or simply left it running in the background. Players who were actually in-game on Steam peaked at just over 6 million.
The most popular games on Steam over the last few days included the military-themed multiplayer shooter Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, which became only the third game on Steam to reach one million concurrent players on March 14, as well as Valve’s DOTA 2, Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six: Siege, and the seemingly immortal Grand Theft Auto V.....MORE
There wasn’t actually a big release weekend on Steam, so you can probably chalk the record high number of players up to the work-from-home, social distancing, and school closure mandates being enforced worldwide.
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