The Steam Summer Sale is drawing to a close – today is the last day to scoop up any unclaimed bargains – and Steam’s stats show that the number of gamers logged in at the same time during the sale peaked at just over the eight million mark. That’s 500,000 more than the peak number reached in December of 2013, during the Christmas sale as reported on the Gamespot forums in early January.
While eight million people being online at the same time doesn’t mean eight million people were playing games, that’s still a very good number if you’re looking to gauge the health of the PC gaming community. And that’s just how many people were using Steam at the same time – the overall number of registered Steam accounts was over 65 million in October 2013.
At the time of writing there are over a million and a half people playing Steam games and a whopping 5.8 million gamers online, fantastic figures considering most of North America is asleep and it’s a work day here and in Europe.
Overall sales of PC hardware may not be doing so great according to all those gloom-and-doomers who keep reporting on falling PC shipment numbers, but despite this Steam’s recent performance shows that PC gaming is on the up. At the very least, more people than ever are flocking to the online distribution platform, and that’s the kind of thing that keeps publishers and independent studios making PC games.
PC gaming is far from dead, then. Take that, naysayers!
[Source – Steampowered.com]
