Steam has officially hit a new all-time active user peak, as over 40 million people are using Valve’s storefront at once. The home of Counter-Strike and Team Fortress has long been the premier place to buy, download, and play games on PC, and this new milestone once again proves it. With the recent launch of Monster Hunter Wilds effortlessly cresting well over one million concurrent players, it’s clear that Valve’s platform isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
As of Sunday March 2 2025, Steam has crossed the threshold of over 40 million active users. The concurrent number has been steadily climbing for years, and it’s showing zero sign of slowing down throughout 2025. The amount of players actually in-game is much lower, but still over an incredibly respectable 12 million. It’s one of the easiest platforms for playing the best PC games, so that’s no surprise.
As of writing, Steam has peaked at a staggering 40,270,997 active users (via SteamDB), and I’m sure that number will continue to climb. Looking at the data provided by SteamDB shows just how far Valve’s store has come. Back in early 2005, active users sat in the 200,000 range, with the platform exponentially growing from around two million in 2010 to over 20 million in 2020. That means, in just the last five years, Steam’s concurrent user count has grown by around 20 million.
Valve’s own Counter-Strike 2 remains a consistent winner for the platform as it closes in on a peak of 1.8 million users, while other games such as PUBG, DOTA 2, and Naraka: Bladepoint continue to hit numbers in the hundreds of thousands each day. New releases like Monster Hunter Wilds have helped Valve reach the milestone, too, with Capcom’s new game quickly becoming one of the platform’s biggest ever at over 1.3 million active players over the launch weekend.
Steam is so big, in fact, that our own findings from last year calculated that between all of us we’ve spent $1.9 billion / £1.4 billion on games we’ve never played. That’s an awful lot just sitting at the bottom of your library, begging to be booted up even once. Even Amazon recognizes the power Steam has over consumers, with one former VP admitting that despite being 250 times bigger, its attempt to rival the platform still lost to Valve.
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