Steam Starts 2026 Strong with New Platform-Wide All-time Concurrent Player Peak

2025 is officially in the past, and we leave behind with it the woes, struggles, and wonders of the industry. From epic titles at surprisingly low prices to AI making it into the medium (ew), it's been another complex year to add to the pile, right beside the NFT spot.

Though it's been a tough year for the industry regarding its pricing and many, many controversies, Valve is celebrating a brand-new achievement for January 2026. On the 4th of January, Steam managed to hit a new all-time concurrent players across the entire platform, marking a new record for Valve to start off the year — a really good start to the year.

Previously, the team had celebrated a new all-time concurrent peak just in the past few months — October 2025 marked the time when Valve broke their previous record, hitting 41,666,455 players at the same time. But just this month, that number was passed, and not by a small margin, either.

The new record of concurrent users for Steam set in January is 41,816,052, which is a whopping 200,000 more than the previous record — those sorts of numbers are seen on top releases within their first few hours (or days) or launch. It sets a strong precedent for the year and a clear message: Steam is going into the year strong, and hopefully, these are signs for more things to come.

It's not an anomaly for Steam to break its concurrent player records, but it'll be interesting to see how the introduction of the Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and more gaming options will affect the overall peaks throughout 2026.