More than 37 million people were online on the Steam gaming platform last Sunday – a new record. This is shown by data from the unofficial Steam tracker SteamDB. Of these, 12.5 million Steam users were playing games at this time – also a record.
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(Image: Heise Online)
The number of users on Steam is growing regularly, so the gaming platform also sets new records frequently. At the beginning of 2023, Steam reached more than 10 million active in-game players and 32 million logged in users for the first time. In June 2024, there were 36.9 million players online at the same time, of whom 11.7 million were playing video games. Nevertheless, the current particularly high values seem to exceed the expected increase in the number of players. The action game “Black Myth Wukong” is probably responsible for this.
“Wukong” soared to No.2 in Steam rankings
“Wukong” is currently being played by at least 2 million people at the same time every day. The hype for “Wukong” reached its peak last Thursday when the title was played by 2.4 million people at the same time. This is enough for second place in the all-time Steam rankings – only “PUBG” achieved a higher value with 3.2 million simultaneous players.
The hyped game “Palward” reached 2.1 million simultaneous players at the beginning of the year and is ranked third in the ranking “Concurrent Steam Users” The statistics measure the maximum number of people playing games at the same time. Most of all, it reflects the peak of the hype, but at least allows rough conclusions to be drawn about the financial success and failure of games.
A large number of “Wukong” players come from China, where the game was developed by Game Science Studio. “Wukong” is also inspired by the Chinese tale “Journey to the West”. The Chinese gaming market is considered the second largest in the world after the United States.
“Black Myth Wukong” caused a stir not only because of the immense interest in the game, but also because of the strange requirements for streamers. According to a document circulating online, anyone who wants to stream “Wukong” or upload it to YouTube is not allowed to engage in “feminist propaganda” or criticize China’s gaming industry or politics.
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