Steam breaks record with 18.8 million concurrent players

Valve's Steam hit a new record on February 2, 2020 as the service achieved a player peak of 18,801,944. That's over 250,000 concurrent gamers more than the previous record, which was set on January 14, 2018. However, the number of active in-game players was only 5.8 million this time, versus about 7 million two years ago:

While the headline figure is up, interestingly there were fewer players actually active in-game during the record breaking period - about 5.8m vs about 7m two years ago. This metric is thought to be out of kilter as "a ton of those accounts are bots," explained @SteamDB in a follow-up Tweet. Meanwhile other concurrent users might be simply doing something else while Steam is running with a game open in the background.

Also worth mentioning is that 14.24 percent of Steam gamers are still running Windows 7, down about 7.5 percent versus the previous month. Overall, not really a smart idea to keep using Windows 7 as this operating system is no longer supported by Microsoft and receives no further security updates. Hexus has some more Steam statistics over here.