PC gaming is still immensely popular and the proof in the pudding can be seen in the player count figures for Valve's platform, Steam. Over the weekend, Steam once again smashed its concurrent player record, as it managed to hit the impressive figure of 41,816,052 players at one single time. It's unclear when the next record will be set, but no doubt it won't be long until the 42 million milestone is overcome.
2025 was an immense year for Steam as in March 2025 it managed to break the 40 million concurrent player marker and hit a whopping 41.2 million players at one time. Since then, it flirted with higher figures, particularly in the autumn where October and November brought peaks of 41.6 and 41.5 million players. Over the last few days, curiously not over the holiday period but the first weekend after the New Year, it has seen another spike and topped 41.8 million players at one time, its highest peak yet.
For reference of just how big Steam is, as of writing around 30 million people are playing games on the platform, which is an enormous amount when compared to PlayStation 5, which is nearing 85 million lifetime console sales to date. Is PC gaming king? It's hard to say otherwise, but perhaps the rapidly increasing price of components like GPUs and RAM will change that in the future...