Since the beginning of 2020, Valve's online store has been consistently updating records for the number of online players. On February 7, the 24-hour maximum for a simultaneous number of Steam users reached 26,401,443, which had outpaced the previous record set on January 2, when the number of concurrent players on the gaming platform exceeded 25.4 million people for the first time in the history of the service. At the time of writing, the number of concurrent users on Steam is 20,584,088.

Last week, the February Steam Game Festival kicked off with over 500 demos available to users. It was probably the festival that contributed to the setting of a new record.

At the time of fixing a new record, less than a third of all users were in games – about 7.3 million people. That is, the April record, when more than 8 million people were actually playing games, is still holding.

At the same time, Steam published new data on game sales for the week from February 1 to February 7, 2021. A cooperative survival about Vikings called Valheim took the lead. The second place was kept by the Chinese role-playing game Tale of Immortal. Nioh 2 also got into the top three. The Mass Effect trilogy remaster also made it to the top 10, and Cyberpunk 2077 dropped from fifth to eighth place.

The Top 10 Best Free Games on Steam
The Steam online platform offers not only a plethora of paid games, but also numerous free-to-play games that are quite decent rivals to their paid competitors, and sometimes even surpass them with quality and fun features.
Frank StichThe Internet Protocol

As the pandemic continues to change consumers' lives by forcing a lot of them to spend more time at home and find new forms of entertainment, more of them switch to gaming platform like Steam, leading to a higher frequency of concurrent users.

Moreover, the official Chinese release of the popular PC gaming platform has also debuted, and Sony also announced that the PS5 would be coming to China soon as well.

HypeGamesSteamSteam Game Festival