Steam hits new record as people stay home due to coronavirus

Valve's Steam service hit a new record on Sunday with a peak of 20.3 milliokn concurrent users, with 6.4 million actively playing a game. This is likely the result of the coronavirus outbreak, governments around the world are now asking (or forcing) citizens to remain at home to flatten the curve of the virus outbreak. With much of Europe's public life grinding to a halt, gaming is a popular option right now.

What was everyone playing? A quick peek at the trending games shows a very familiar list of rather old favourites, especially multiplayer and eSports titles. The top five games currently are; GS:GO, Dota2, PUBG, GTA V, and Rainbow Six Siege. In the last 24 hours those games have peaked at between 1m and 200k concurrent players. Meanwhile it is interesting to see Borderlands 3 trending - as it only just became available on Steam on Friday after six months of Epic Games Store exclusivity (on PC). Another strong trending game was State of Decay 2, similarly released on Steam on Friday 13th.

#Steam has just reached a new concurrent online user record of 20 million, with 6.2 million currently in-game, likely due to many people staying at home due to the #coronavirus.https://t.co/bzLMfMOJvD#COVID19

— Steam Database (@SteamDB) March 15, 2020

Via: Hexus