Online gaming platform and marketplace Steam has reached a new peak of over 42 million concurrent users as of Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. The new zenith of 42,042,778 users was reached sometime this past weekend, as per the Steam tracking website SteamDB.
Steam, the platform created by developer and publisher Valve Software, creators of Half-Life, Counter-Strike, and Dota 2, remains the most utilized gaming marketplace, and shows now signs of slowing down.
Steam 42 Million All-Time Peak. Image Credit: SteamDB
The new all-time user number beats the 2025 peak of around 41.6 million, recorded late in the year. Steam has for the last 22 years seen growth in its user base, growing from just a few hundred thousand in 2004, to 420x that number.
These users represent players that are online with the app loaded, rather than active, in-game players. On desktop PCs, Steam often runs in the background. Total user numbers could be far higher.
Steam’s API is publicly accessible, which is why this information is available.
While there’s likely some immediate reasons for the peak, such as a post holiday-season boom (new users with new hardware) and gamers trapped inside during a snowy weekend, overall the rise could primarily be predicated on quality of service Steam offers versus other options.
Steam gained almost half a million users over the holiday period. Image Credit: SteamDB
In a world where online play on PlayStation, Xbox consoles, and Nintendo is gated by monthly fees, Steam’s “buy it and play it for free” model, combined with a huge, unfathomably endless library, (and plenty of free games on Steam) makes it the obvious choice.
Beyond this, many of the company’s competitors in the online space, such as Xbox Game Pass and Ubisoft Connect struggle with elements such as basic functionality.
More capable competitors, including Epic Games Store and GOG, have tried alternative initiatives to differentiate themselves from Steam and attract users.
In June 2025, Epic Game announced that each game would keep 100% of the revenue for the first $1m it made per year. On a platform that often offers game publishers deals to release their games for free on the platform, it seemed to be a move to attract more developers to choose Epic over Steam, and therefore, offer a more unique service.
Meanwhile, GOG focused on its strengths. Being a platform that focused on older games and preservation, it launched its Patrons programme, a way for users to support those efforts. In late December, the company also separated itself from developer CD PROJEKT, a move which secured its independence and signalled its devotion to the preservation initiative.
Still, Steam is a juggernaut, and likely dwarfs the userbase of all of its competitor, although public numbers for those are harder to come by. Unverified claims by Microsoft employees put the number of Xbox Game Pass subscribers at around 37 million in 2025, but those numbers were inflated by a rebranding of Xbox Live (the console-only service) to Game Pass in 2023.
All this likely means that Steam is the the king, and will likely remain so for a long time.
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Featured Image Credit: SteamDB
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