Over the weekend, Steam broke its record for the largest number of concurrent players, with more than 34 million simultaneous users on the platform. The new figure broke Steam’s previous highest record, set in January 2024, when the digital shopfront had more than 33 million concurrent users.

The numbers come from SteamDB, which claims 1,1146,564 users out of 3,4649,583 were actively playing the game when the record was set on Sunday. The largest number of players during the recording period was collected by the free shooter Counter-Strike 2 from Valve, in which 1.4 million simultaneous launches were registered.

Valve’s other free-to-play game, DOTA 2, came in second with over 727,000 players in the last 24 hours. PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS with more than 638,000 players, Apex Legends with more than 454,000 players and Helldivers 2 with 431,000 players rounded out the top five.

Other games that also contributed significantly to the record include popular titles such as GTA V, Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring and Baldur’s Gate 3, each of which had more than 100,000 concurrent players. The wildly popular Pokémon-style survival RPG Palworld, which sold 6 million copies in its first six days of release, also contributed heavily to the record with over 250,000 players.

Steam has long been the primary digital store for PC gamers, but its concurrent user base began to grow exactly four years ago, in March 2020, when pandemic-induced quarantine restrictions left plenty of people with enough free time to play video games for hours on end. While February 2020’s record was 19.1 million concurrent players, that figure rose to 23.6 million the following month, at least in part due to global lockdowns.

The rest of this year is expected to be even more exciting for Steam users, with several highly anticipated games coming to the platform. Among them is the survival horror first-person shooter STALKER 2, which will be the first game in the franchise since the release of STALKER: Call of Pripyat in 2009.