Steam has now broken its active player record

Steam has broken its all-time record for active players, as countries around the world isolate amid the COVID-19 outbreak.

On Sunday the platform recorded 7.25 million users concurrently playing games, which narrowly beat the record set in January 2018 (7.2m).

Steam also broke its record for concurrent active users (people using the service but not necessarily in-game) for the third weekend in a row.

On Sunday the PC games platform registered some 23.4 million active users, beating the previous records of 22m set last weekend.

Gaming platforms have seen a surge in activity in recent weeks, as governments across the world advise citizens to stay at home and avoid socialising.

This month both Nintendo and Xbox online services experienced downtime, with Microsoft confirming its own outage was due to increased demand.

Sony has moved to slow PlayStation download speeds in the US and Europe, while Microsoft has said it’s attempting to push “higher-bandwidth activities” like game updates during off-peak hours.

In the UK physical game sales have recently tripled, with retailers reportedly crediting the increase in demand for games to consumers preparing to stay at home to slow the spread of the COVID-19 virus.

Overall more than 475,000 physical games were sold in the UK in the week ending March 22, which is more than three times the previous week’s numbers.