A little less than a month after doing so the previous time, Steam has once again broken the record for concurrent users. The Valve gaming platform is a mainstay on most gamers' desktops and one of the oldest and most well-known PC video game markets and launchers. It offers a huge selection of games from publishers throughout the whole industry. 

That's not to suggest that Steam doesn't have strong rivals, of course. Over the past decade or so, a number of companies have launched their own gaming services, with the Epic Games Store and GOG being the most notable examples. Nevertheless, Steam is able to hold a sizable portion of the market, and its most recent compilation of past user statistics supports this. 

Third-party tracker SteamDB, as is sometimes the case, claims a slightly higher figure of 31,379,760 concurrent players, 9.3 of whom were online and actively gaming at the time the record was established. Since the epidemic started in 2020, the number of steams has been continuously increasing, reaching a prior peak of just under 30 million back in March of this year. This was again broken towards the end of October when the PC client recorded 30,049,264 concurrent players. 

PUBG: Battlegrounds, Dota 2, and CS: GO are the most popular titles right now, with Modern Warfare 2 coming in at a solid fourth place thanks to a significant peak of 373,000+ players earlier today. Today's top five most-played games on Steam are all free-to-play titles, with the exception of Modern Warfare 2, which is followed by Lost Ark and Apex Legends. The top 10 is completed by GTA 5, Wallpaper Engine, and Naraka: Bladepoint. 

It seems to sense that Steam's frequently amazing sales are a significant pull for users. For example, gamers could get the Valve Complete Pack for less than $7 during the Steam Autumn Sale, which included roughly two dozen of Valve's best games. Such discounts are rather regular, and Steam continues to be the most used PC gaming client even though rival marketplaces have attempted to copy them and in some cases even managed to outperform them. 

Valve has finally delivered a piece of consumer gaming hardware with the speedy shipment of Steam Decks. The Deck is the company's most well-known product to date, despite prior ventures into gaming gear and VR solutions in particular. It's obvious that Valve will become even more well-known in the future as the corporation quietly prototypes a new VR system in the background.