With the outbreak of COVID-19 all across the globe, social distancing and staying indoors has been implemented by most in the world. With over 4.5 lakh cases and 22,000 deaths, COVID-19 has been labelled as a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) and has started creating fear, anxiety and unrest among everyone. Amidst all of this crisis, staying at home and no social gatherings have been encouraged by countries. So to entertain themselves, people have switched to gaming. This is the ideal time for all gamers to embark on their gaming journey every single day. So it is safe to say, there should be an increase in the gaming numbers.
Steam, Valve’s PC gaming distribution service and marketplace has witnessed a surge in the number of players. A milestone has been created as they have achieved 22 million registered users. During the first week of February, Steam’s previous record of 18,537,490 users (which was recorded in January 2018) was broken. A new record was set at 18,801,944.
Steam Database has been recording this upward spike and have reported that the records have been broken a lot of times including last weekend, where the 20 million users landmark was broken. Surreal, right?
Another interesting fact was with the surge in the number of users. Traditional popular games of Steam such as PUBG, Dota 2 and CS:GO has not witnessed a rise in the steam players count. Instead players are resorting to less popular games such as 2013’s Tomb Raider reboot and Doom:Eternal and Football Manager 2020. All of which have broken into the top 5 on Steam’s charts.
With countries implementing lock-downs and forcing people to stay indoors in a bid to curb down the virus spread, gaming numbers are only going to increase. Not only on Steam players count, but also on other gaming platforms.
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