Does this seem familiar? You would be right. In the last week, both Steam and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive hit new records for users online and they've been broken yet again today. Absolute madness.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive went from a record of 850,485 set in 2016 to a new record of 876,575 set on Saturday February 8. This was then smashed on Sunday, February 9 as CS:GO hit around 901,681 (SteamDB). Pretty damn good for a first-person shooter that's been around since 2012.

Then we have Steam itself which went from a record of 18,537,490 set in January 2018 up to 18,801,944 this month. Again, that record has been smashed with a new high of around 19,107,803 users on Sunday February 8 (SteamDB).

What do you think is driving all this sudden and repeating growth?

Shows that in the face of increasing competition, Valve is once again continuing to grow their Steam platform. Good news for us since Valve continue to try and improve Linux gaming with Proton for Steam Play, the ACO shader compiler for AMD, their new experimental Container system and also Gamescope. That's only the tip of the iceberg too—Valve do quite a lot it's just not often talked about outside Linux circles.