After one week, Steam has smashed through another player milestone

Exactly one week ago, I mentioned how Steam achieved a concurrent player record of over 34.6 million users. Well, guess what? It’s gone and topped that again, possibly owing its latest milestone numbers to the perfect storm of old games with new updates and new games being…well, new.

In the latest statistics over on Steam itself, the number of concurrent players reached 35,377,613 in the last 24 hours or so, breaking the previous record that was set just last week. In an era in which gamers feel more cynical and pessimistic about the state of the industry, it doesn’t seem to be putting too many PC users off.

More than 35 million players is a pretty stonking figure, and at the time of writing, there are over 27 million currently online. Who knows whether we’ll see these numbers go beyond.

Is it nostalgia, democracy, or ‘Pokemon with guns’?

It’s probably not too unusual to see surges in player counts every so often. To see it smash through two records in the space of seven days is quite something, though. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what’s behind the rise of these figures, but lately, we’ve seen the perfect storm of Steam successes with games like Palworld and Helldivers 2.

However, there’s also the recent EA release of a bunch of classic games to Steam. Examples include things like Command & Conquer, SimCity 3000, and Dungeon Keeper 2, some of which have never been on Valve’s digital storefront until now. Even if you didn’t pick one up and play, some of us surely had to go see it to believe it.

A quick SteamDB check shows the surge of some “older” favorites, too. Elden Ring just dated its Shadow of the Erdtree DLC for June, so of course, Fromsoft’s 2022 hit has fought for a spot in the top 10 again ever since. Stardew Valley is also on the uptick, as developer ConcernedApe just announced its 1.6 update arrives on PC later this month.

Whatever the reason, it seems there’s probably a lesson to be learned here for anyone looking to release games on PC. That is to say, wait until the weekend and then just unleash a bunch of much-loved retro titles and watch those numbers soar. Easy.