What just happened? We're in the middle of the Steam Summer Sale, and that means millions of people are logging into Valve's platform to buy games, many of which they'll never play. As such, Steam's concurrent user count has been broken once again, reaching a massive 36,928,521.
The annual Steam Summer Sale is one of Valve's biggest discount events, on par with the massive Winter Sale – check out some of the great deals on offer right now.
The big discounts have seen more people than ever before jumping onto Steam. As recorded by SteamDB, the concurrent user record was broken around 19 hours ago (at the time of writing) when 36,928,521 people were using the platform.
It's important to note that this figure covers people who were logged into Steam – not all of them were playing games. Around a third were actually in-game, the rest were likely browsing the store, talking to friends, etc.
The in-game concurrent record of 11,795,523 set on March 18 this year still stands, though it was almost broken yesterday when 11,711,482 people were playing Steam games at the same time.
The current Steam Summer Sale started on June 27 and runs until July 11, so there's still over a week left. There's always the chance that the concurrent user and/or in-game records could reach new all-time highs before its over.
Helping attract more people to the Steam Summer Sale is the new Deep Discounts section. As the name suggests, these are some of the biggest price drops on Steam right now, including 95% off Civilization VI ($2.99), and 90% off titles such as Castle Crashers, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Breakpoint, Jurassic World Evolution 2, and Batman: Arkham Knight.
The sale is also a good opportunity for those who've been afraid to splash out on Elden Ring to try FromSoftware's game. Its 30% discount brings the price down to $41.99, and the very popular Shadow of the Erdtree expansion is also available (but not on sale as it's just been released).