It was a rough holiday season for Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network, but it was a different story altogether for Steam. The platform set a new record for peak concurrent users on January 1, when at one point more than 8.4 million people were on it at the same time.
According to the Steam Game and Player Statistics page, there were 8,466,441 people using Steam simultaneously at around 11:30 in the morning on January 1. It's not the first time Steam has broken the eight million mark—it first happened, just barely, in late June 2014—but it's far and away the highest number of concurrent users it's ever seen.
Dota 2 was the most popular game of the day by a large margin, attracting 875,000 players, followed distantly by Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, which peaked out at 360,000 users. Rounding out the top five were Team Fortress 2 at 89,000 users, Football Manager 2015 at 75,000, and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim at 66,000.
It's only been a year since Steam broke the seven million concurrent user mark, which itself came just a year after it sailed past six million. That's an impressive rate of growth by any measure. Maybe there's something to those Steam sales after all, eh?
