Steam has started 2015 with a bang, hitting a new record for the most concurrent users, logging upward of 8.5 million users.
The Steam game and player statistics page says that exactly 8,500,245 people were online on Steam at once, around 2:10 p.m. EST on Jan. 2.
Steam has once before broken the 8 million mark, which happened in June 2014, however the New Year's Day number is by far the most users online at once on the gaming service.
As far as individual games go, Dota 2 was by far the most popular game, attracting 879,827 players at one time. This was distantly followed by Counter-Strike: Global Offensive with 383,584 players. Team Fortress 2 followed with 92,606 users, then Football Manager 2015 at 77,749 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim with 66,000.
The news comes around a year after Steam broke the 7 million concurrent player mark, which came around a year after it broke the 6 million concurrent player mark. The rate of growth is quite impressive and is only likely to continue in the way that it is going.
Steam's success shows that while mobile gaming is certainly getting a lot of attention and is growing extremely quickly, PC gaming is still growing and thriving.
In September, Steam also announced that it had broken the 100 million native accounts mark, up from the 75 million that it had announced in January 2013. Each native account marks a registered user.
Reports also suggest that Steam has added a frame rate counter to the Steam Overlay of the beta Steam Client. Users of Steam have been asking for a frame rate counter for quite a long time, and there have been third-party tools available to track frame rates during gaming. Still, the feature is certainly a welcome addition, and players will also be able to visually customize their frame rate counter in terms of color, font and display.
Users can download the beta client by going to their account settings and looking for a checkbox marked "beta participation." Once the box is checked, users simply need to go to their in-game settings and choose to "show in-game frames/sec (FPS)."
In related Steam news, a number of games have been removed from Steam, likely due to licensing issues. The two games are Aliens: Colonial Marines and Alien Vs. Predator. It is almost certain that the cause was the end of a licensing agreement considering the fact that both of the games utilized properties by 20th Century Fox and were available right up until 2015 started.
