Steam just hit more concurrent players than there are people in Canada, as Counter-Strike 2 and PUBG push it to a new peak

Did you make any New Year's resolutions? Mine are all fairly boring. Paint more toy soldiers, eat more chocolate, finish that novel I've been working on for years. You know the sort. If Valve's was to bring more players to Steam than ever before, it's already succeeded just five days into the year. With the release of the Steam Machine rapidly coalescing into a vivid cube shape on the horizon, I can only see Valve breaking this record time and time again throughout 2026.

Steam reached the new heights on January 4, as 41,816,052 (yes, over 41.8 million) of us sat down to play some goshdarn videogames. At that time (and as usual), the charge was led by people playing Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, and PUBG: Battlegrounds - some of the best multiplayer games around, if you ask me.

Okay, only a fraction of those 41m players were actually in-game, but you get the picture. Nearly 13.4 million players were actively gaming, with the other ~28 million browsing the sales, scrolling through their library, or generally being otherwise occupied on their desktop while the Steam app was open but minimized. Still, it's wildly impressive that Steam has now peaked at more users than there are people living in Canada.

Don't believe me? Check out the SteamDB data for yourself. The Canadian government estimates its country's population to be nearly 41.6m people as of Q4 2025. Take that one to your next pub quiz.

I can only see these numbers rising from here. While many analysts believed gaming numbers would peak during the COVID-19 pandemic, Steam's userbase has nearly doubled since the first lockdown in April 2020. With the prices of consoles rising to rival those of PCs and new handhelds like the Steam Deck providing great experiences, who knows what heights Valve's platform could rise to next. Argentina? Spain? South Korea?

With the Steam Machine arriving soon, Valve is seeking to monopolize gaming habits, especially on PC. The console's price point will be a major factor in its success, but Steam is quickly becoming a household name in the industry, alongside Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo. I'm still not sure my mom would know it, but that's a hurdle for another time.