What just happened? Steam's concurrent player record has been broken once again, thanks in no small part to the success of Black Myth: Wukong. A massive 37.2 million people were logged into Valve's platform over the weekend, smashing the previous record of 36 million people that was set earlier this year.
According to Steam's own figures, there were 37,258,373 people logged into the service on August 25, beating the previous record of 36.35 million set in March.
We often see a spike in concurrent Steam users during big gaming events such as Gamescom, which was running over the weekend. But the biggest factor has been the launch of Black Myth: Wukong. GameScience's recently released title has been a phenomenal success, having broken Steam's concurrent record for a single-player game within hours of its release and selling 10 million copies in three days.
Black Myth: Wukong has seen a peak of 2.13 million concurrent players over the last 24 hours, according to SteamDB. Its 2.41 million all-time peak is second only to PUBG: Battlegrounds, which peaked at 3.25 million people. As the game is developed by a Chinese company and based on the 16th-century Chinese novel Journey to the West, it's estimated that around 80% of all players are from China.
Black Myth: Wukong's success is a far cry from PlayStation's new first-person hero shooter Concord. Despite having an enormous budget and mostly positive reviews on Steam, its concurrent player numbers peaked at just 697 and have been falling ever since. At the time of writing, it has 142 players, while 1.51 million people are playing Wukong.
Steam's in-game concurrent player record was also broken over the weekend. The number of people playing games at the same time reached 12,534,703 yesterday.
Steam isn't slowing down. Any perceived threat to its dominance from the Epic Games store has failed to materialize as the platform goes from strength to strength. At this rate, it won't be long before the 40 million concurrent player milestone is reached.