Steam has become one of the major players in the game industry and if all goes according to plan, the console industry via SteamOS and SteamMachines. It seems that Steam reached new heights when it broke its previously held record of most users online. On December 26 Steam had about 7.5 Million users online at that instance, which is approximately 10% of its registered user base.

Steam Achieves Record-Shattering Number of Concurrent Users Simultaneously Online

According to Steam Stats and Site-Metrics the exact number of people was 7,506,008, approximately 7.5 Million and about a Half Million more than the record set on December 2. Whats more this number of concurrent users seems to be holding to the next cycle. More interestingly however is the question of whether the Steam infrastructure can handle such massive fluxes in traffic in Holidays.

You might notice the abrupt drop in Steam's traffic about the time it reached its new record number of concurrent users. Well that's because a fraction of Steam Servers went down due to the massive load. I experienced it personally and a lot of other players did too. Thing is, Steam should have expected the increase in traffic and prepared accordingly. It is the holiday season after all and when you have massive Christmas sale and Left For Dead 2 for free, you really should be better prepared. Apart from the holidays, what exactly caused massive influx of traffic. One words: Wraith-Night (Technically Two?).

As can be seen by these metrics, Dota 2 has the highest number of active players, most of whom are participating in a Christmas Special Mode called Wraith Night. After that, is of course Left for Dead 2 because of its free nature. Team Fortress 2 is also an expected candidate, however the rest were not so obvious. Still a great shout out to Steam for the achievement and we will sure to be on the look out for the next all time high.