Steam has once again hit all new highs. Just this past weekend, Steam reached a new high of 32 million users online at at the same time. During this record-breaking peak, Steam also saw over 10 million of those players actually in-game concurrently. This is the first time that Steam reached 10 million concurrent in-game players.
These milestones were shared first by SteamDB. They show that these new records were set on Saturday, January 7. The peak in-game concurrent player count hit 10,082,055 and the concurrent online users at the same time were 32,186,301.
Just one day later, these records were already broken. On Sunday, January 8, the peak online player count went almost 1 million players above the figure set on Saturday. On Sunday, Steam saw 33,078,963 people on at the same time. Around the same period of time on Sunday, Steam saw 10,284,568 as a new in-game peak.
At a quick glance, it seems like some of the games that were most popular during these peaks include: Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, DOTA 2, Goose Goose Duck, PUBG: Battlegrounds, and Apex Legends.
It's rather interesting that these peaks were hit when they were. The Steam Winter Sale ended days prior. The holidays were also long gone. There weren't any major game releases this past week either. The surge is curious but it could have a little something to do with one of games we mentioned prior: Goose Goose Duck.
According to Kotaku, Goose Goose Duck is a game similar to Among Us. From my personal look at the game, it's essentially a shameless, near straight copy of Among Us but with animal characters. It's also apparently far more popular than Among Us right now. The game, released back in October 2021 (yes, 2021 and not 2022), saw a massive surge in popularity after some K-pop star played the game back in November 2022. Kim "V" Tae-hyung, of the K-pop group BTS, streaming the game with fans was all it really took to jumpstart the game's sudden surge in popularity.
Goose Goose Duck went from average daily player peaks of 3,000-4,000 prior to November 2022 to an average daily player peak of over 331,000 today. The most players ever online playing came on Sunday, January 8, 2023 with 640,324 concurrent players. To compare, Among Us peaked at 447,476 concurrent players two years ago.
While this probably isn't the only reason for Steam's new records, the sudden surge in popularity for Goose Goose Duck is most certainly a contributing factor to records being set.
