Steam defies RAM-ageddon and the AI-pocalypse to smash through a new concurrent user record, and I'll see you back here in like 4 months when it somehow does it again

Chalk up a win for small business! The Seattle offices of Valve Corporation—a plucky upstart company co-founded by Washington businessman Gabe "Gaben" Newell—must have been abuzz recently, when its videogame storefront Steam pipped a steamy milestone in its concurrent user metrics.

Sorry, I've written so many articles about Steam's concurrent user records that I decided to try talking about it like a local news channel covering a bake sale, just to see how it feels. Anyway, over the weekend (Sunday, to be exact), Steam broached the 42 million concurrent user limit, hitting a new record of 42,042,778 users online at the same time (per SteamDB). Not a bad way to kick off the year, if you're a titanic videogame storefront.

Which, yes, on the one hand, is hardly a surprise. Steam's growth has been relentless and undaunted for ages. It hit 41 million in October, 40 million in March, and 39 million in December 2024. I suspect I will see you back here in a few months when it hits 43 million. On and on it goes.

But! Credit where it's due: these are fairly bleak times for this whole PC gaming thing. Also, the entire rest of society, but let's stay focused. As you're no doubt excruciatingly aware, building a PC in 2026, well, sucks.

RAM is absurdly expensive because a cabal of billionaires has bought up, like, all of it to plug into the data centres powering their brain-melting lie engines. SSDs are more expensive too, as NAND production for AI server drives subtracts from production of NAND production for mere mortals like you and me. Oh, and GPUs are ridiculously pricey when their makers deign to remember videogames exist at all. Because of, yeah, AI.

So it's perhaps some small encouragement that, for all that it truly blows to try to assemble a gaming PC in the year 2026, the dominant PC game storefront continues to hoover up users like some kind of, ah, hoover. You hear that, Altman? Buy up all the memory you want*, we'll just keep playing on our 6-year-old CPUs and 16GB of RAM and keep on trucking.

*Please stop doing this, actually, if you happen to be reading.