Steam Has a Head of… Steam!

7 million concurrent (all at the same time, for low information folks) sessions! Rock on!

Steam surpasses 7 million concurrent users for the first time

Venture Beat – “Microsoft’s and Sony’s new consoles are the hot items for this holiday season, but the excitement for those boxes isn’t causing any slowdown on the PC side of things.

Game-distribution service Steam just topped 7 million concurrent online customers for the first time in its history. This new record comes in the midst of the annual fall sale that Valve holds for its digital-download platform.

Steam approached the 7-million mark for the past several days, but it peaked at 7.19 million customers around 11 a.m. Pacific time today. In late October, Valve revealed that Steam has 65 million registered accounts. That means that more than one in every 10 Steam members were using the service today. That’s a huge number of engaged gamers.

This new record also represents significant growth over last year. Steam had around 6 million peak concurrent users during its 2012 fall sale. That’s a 17 percent growth in engagement for a platform that was already well established in 2012.

Steam should only continue to grow. Valve announced plans to expand the service out into its own operating system — called SteamOS — based on Linux in the near future. The company will also work with hardware manufacturers to bundle SteamOS on new PCs called Steam Machines.”