From a technical perspective No Man’s Sky hasn’t had an smooth launch on PC. But in terms of sales, it’s already one of the biggest launches ever of a game on Steam. Steam Stats , an official resource created by Valve, shows that 212,620 people were simultaneously playing No Man’s Sky on launch day so far. In North America and Europe alone the Steam servers were serving a combined 4.7 terabits per second as people downloaded the game.

You might be thinking: “Eh, that’s far less than Dota 2 ,” which is drawing just over 1 million concurrents in the middle of its biggest tournament of the year. And you’re right. But consider this: 212,620 players is at least 46% more than what was achieved by every other 2016 release at launch, and it's possible that more people will boot up No Man’s Sky on Saturday or Sunday, when Steam activity is typically at its weekly peak.

Here are the peak concurrent players for some major games that released on Steam this year:



XCOM 2 133,022

133,022 Dark Souls 3 129,975

129,975 Total War: Warhammer 113,019

113,019 Starbound 62,301 (after leaving Early Access )

62,301 (after ) Doom 44,271

44,271 Hitman 12,582

And the all-time highs of breakout, surprise hits from 2016:

Stellaris 68,602

68,602 Stardew Valley 64,632

64,632 Factorio 16,281

16,281 RimWorld 15,063

And the all-time highs of other, longer-standing popular games that aren’t Dota 2 or CS:GO:

Rocket League 103,129 (during a free weekend)

103,129 (during a free weekend) The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt 92,267

92,267 ARK: Survival Evolved 84,961 (during a free weekend)

84,961 (during a free weekend) Rust 64,982

All concurrent players figures via steamdb.info, which compiles Steam Stats data.