[UPDATE] Fallout 4 is now the top game on all of Steam in terms of current players.

The original story appears below.

The long-awaited release of Bethesda's Fallout 4 came to an end on the stroke of midnight on Tuesday, and shortly after its release on Steam, the open-world RPG amassed more than 290,000 concurrent players.

That brings Fallout 4 within distance of the peak Steam concurrent user record set by Grand Theft Auto V, which in April brought more than 300,000 players on Valve's PC platform. Later it went on to set an even bigger record, according to independent monitor Steam Charts, with 360,000 peak players.

GTA 5's record had, incidentally, broken the previous benchmark set by another Bethesda game, Skyrim, which shipped in 2011 and drew in about 280,000 users.

These records are for Steam games not developed by Valve, which manages the platform. Valve's two most popular games, Counter-Strike Global Offensive and Dota 2, have previously amassed about 820,000 and 1.26 million concurrent players respectively.

Fallout 4 released on Tuesday November 10 across the UK, Australia, and North America.

GameSpot's Fallout 4 review was loaded with praise for the open-world title, though it said that various bugs had affected the experience. Critic Peter Brown cited "plainly framed scenes and basic animations lend a roughness to the finish product, as do its frequent glitches."

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