PC gaming is dead! Oh wait, let me put that tired cliche back in the bin where it belongs. PC gaming is more alive than ever, with Valve revealing there are 33 million players active every day on Steam, and 67 million every month. In fact, new players are coming to Steam at a rate of 1.5 million each and every month.

The figures come via official Valve slides shown at a recent presentation to developers. 27 million new gamers have to Steam over the last 18 months alone. That’s more users than Microsoft has sold Xbox One consoles life to date.

These aren’t just dummy accounts made by users trying to circumvent their CS:GO bans either; Steam recently reached a new peak of 14 million concurrent users, more than half a million of which were playing PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. That’s up from 8.4 million just two years ago, in 2015, a rise of 66%. In total there are now 125 million active Steam accounts. In comparison to the consoles, Xbox Live has 53 million users while the PlayStation Network has 70 million active users. That makes the online gaming scene in Steam alone bigger than both Xbox and PlayStation combined.

Breaking things down by region, North America takes the lion’s share with 34%, Europe’s in second place with 29%, and Asia holds 17 per cent. One little nugget I read about the Asian market in Edge magazine recently though was that Tencent has serious plans to edge Steam out of the Chinese market. A number of key shareholders are Chinese state officials, and according to Edge’s sources, plans may be put into place to ban Steam in China, handing total control to Tencent. That shouldn’t make too much of a dent in Valve’s success though, with both Japan and Korea boasting recent bumps in Steam users and sales figures.

In a nutshell, Steam and PC are now some of the biggest dedicated gaming markets in the world. The future’s never looked brighter for PC gamers, evident in the smaller and smaller percentage of titles that don’t launch on the platform.

Rejoice, PC gaming is vibrant. Are you noticing more and more of friends heading over from the dark side? Will it be the one platform to rule them all soon? Let us know your thoughts!