Valve has once again literally outdone themselves as they have now reached a new record high number of concurrent players.
This Sunday, November 27, 2022, Valve’s platform reached 31,906,400 players, logged online at the same time as reported by SteamDB. This of course happened on the same weekend as this year’s Thanksgiving and Black Friday weekend.
Valve’s official numbers are a little higher at 31,968,428, which would be in the same margin of error. However, it may also reflect discrepancies in SteamDB’s data collection that Valve can adjust for with their own access to the complete data.
Valve did not provide more of their own information as to why they had hit this record, but there’s some publicly available information we could look to to point as possible explanations. Of course, Valve’s PC gaming platform continues to be popular. More Steam players are compelled to use Valve, playing games or not, thanks to the introduction of their successful hardware release, the Steam Deck.
About a month ago, Valve published a major update to their handheld gaming platform. This update allows Steam Deck owners to play Red Dead Redemption 2 on SteamOS. This makes one of the more popular games of this generation playable to Steam Deck owners. On top of that, this was also a major technical achievement, as the Deck can run Red Dead Redemption 2 at 40 to 55 FPS, well above the level it can run on both PlayStation and Xbox consoles.
Still, there is a bigger and more likely explanation for this jump in Steam users than their hardware. Activision had recently decided to return to Valve’s platform, with their major reentry being Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 and Call of Duty Warzone 2.0. Both games came to Steam as a strange automatic double download, filling it out storage for Steam users rapidly, as you can read about here.
Activision revealed that the free-to-play Call of Duty Warzone 2.0 already reached 25 million players even before the Thanksgiving/Black Friday weekend. That number would have been shared between Steam and Activision/Blizzard’s own client, and that likely leaned more towards the Activision Blizzard client. Nonetheless, Call of Duty’s re-entry to Steam raised interest in Steam users to jump back in. If they weren’t actively playing games on that day, they were more likely catching up to whatever deals were still available before everyone ended their sales.
Source: GameRant