After breaking 26 million concurrents in April, Steam has now set a new record, with 27,384,959 accounts logging onto Valve's launcher all at once, as counted by SteamDB. Of those, 7.8 million were in-game at the time, which is under the record 8.1 million from March of 2020, but still rather a lot of people playing CS:GO.
Thanksgiving weekend certainly helps perk the numbers up, as Americans doing seasonal tech support for their family turn on computers that have sat idle in someone's den or whatever for months while Steam logs on automatically. So do the Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales, and all of those people buying Cyberpunk 2077 while it's half-price and then leaving 'very positive' user reviews. (It's still the top global seller on Steam, and has received 22,579 recent reviews, 84% of which are positive.)
Today's top games by peak player count were CS:GO (915,791 players), Dota 2 (677,744), and PUBG (344,841). Halo Infinite managed a respectable 146,212 players, and however many of those were cheaters driving Xbox players to demand they be allowed to opt-out of crossplay, it was too many.
