Steam has achieved a record-level number of active users, ticking in at a 24-hour peak of 18,801,944 players at 8:20 a.m. Central Time on February 2, 2020, as announced via the SteamDB Twitter account Tuesday. At this time, the number of actual in-game users hit 5,956,968.
This figure beats the previous record set on January 14, 2018, when a total of 18,537,490 users logged in. This record in 2018 saw a peak player count of 7,188,164 gamers, which is significantly higher than yesterday's player count.
In May, Steam surpassed the 1 billion mark for Steam accounts; however, we noted at the time that it wasn't a particularly meaningful figure since people often make new accounts to bypass bans in free-to-play games.
This new record number of logged-in users is a much more meaningful way of measuring Valve's success. Still, the 18.8 million figure also includes people who just have Steam set to auto-start in the background when turning their PC on and were not actually playing a game.
Unfortunately, SteamDB didn't further specify what the 7.2 million gamers were actually playing, though we can tell from SteamDB's other charts that the three most popular titles are Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Dota 2 and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds.
