It seems that Steam only continues to grow as the years wear on rather than diminish as so many other platforms do. It’s doing so regardless of growing amounts of competition from the likes of Epic Games Store and the various publisher-centric services. It’s quite increible how much staying power Valve’s platform has, being strong enough to conintue to set new user records despite now being over 20 years old. In fact, it just recently set one for concurrent users!

As reported by DSO Gaming, Steam’s new record for concurrent users, set just a couple of days ago, now sits at 38,367,277. Put another way, over 38 million people were online and playing games on Steam at the same time! Isn’t that nuts? Also, the site reports that the top five games being played are Counter Strike 2, PUBG, Dota 2, Black Myth: Wukong and Banana.

I’d expect the first three since all have been highly popular multiplayer games from the beginning, but I’m a bit surprised to see that Black Myth: Wukong and Banana are still up there. The former is interesting since we’re now a couple of weeks out from launch, so in theory, most of those who bought it would likely have finished it by now. As for Banana, I’m convinced people are playing it for the memes, because how else would you explain a single-click, single-action game being so popular?

I mostly like Valve as a company, so I see this as mostly a good thing so long as they don’t start trying to take advantage. That’s probably unlikely, though, since Steam absolutely rakes in the cash already. All I really have against the company is its refusal to make new games for its beloved series like Portal and Half-Life.

Are you a regular Steam user? What do you like most about it? What do you dislike?