Steam broke its concurrent user record for a second weekend
Active users surge as public urged to stay home
Steam has broken its record for concurrent active users for the second weekend in a row.
On Saturday the PC games platform registered over 22 million active users, beating the previous records of 19m and 20m set last weekend, March 14 and 15.
Around 7 million of those active players were concurrently playing games, which is close to the record set in January 2018 (7.2m).
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.
Last week both Nintendo and Xbox online services experienced downtime, with Microsoft confirming it’s own outage was due to increased demand.
According to outage detector website Downdetector, there has also been a jump in the number of reported PlayStation Network issues recently, although Sony hasn’t officially acknowledged any such problems.
In the UK physical game sales have tripled in the past week, 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 over the past week, which is more than three times the previous week’s numbers.
While Animal Crossing and Doom: Eternal played a big part in the increase, game sales in general have increased in the region. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare enjoyed a 282% sales jump, FIFA 20 posted a 326% increase and Mario Kart 8: Deluxe achieved a rise of 100%.
