Steam breaks its concurrent user record

Let 29 June 2014 forever be remembered as the day that Steam passed 8 million concurrent users – pass around the champagne, because the PC master race has once again proven its dedication to the platform.

According to Steam’s official stats page, the break happened around 23:45 (American time) on 29 June, with much thanks to the Dota 2 and Counter-Strike crowd.

Dota 2 peaked close to 775,300 players, while CS: Global Offensive saw 163,450 players logging in. Other big games drawing gamers to Steam were Team Fortress 2, Garry’s Mod, Payday 2 and Skyrim.

Steam user peaks

Steam also has a stats page for total downloads (in Bytes) over the past 7 days. This covers a time when the Steam Summer Sale was going down, and gives some indication of how popular the discounted deals were (until Valve releases the official stats, anyway).

According to extrapolated data, Steam users downloaded over 114PB (that’s Petabytes – so 114 million GB, give or take) over the past 7 days.

So, how is South Africa faring compared to the rest of the world?

Steam global traffic hotspots

Well, unsurprisingly, SA hasn’t really made a dent in the global download figure, accounting for only 0.2% of the total – about 174TB over the past 7 days.

Compared to the global leader – the USA – which has downloaded over 27.5PB (24.1%), we’re barely a drop in the ocean.

Russia, with 8PB of data downloaded in the last week (7.0% of the total), is the world’s second-biggest Steam game hoarder, with the Germans taking third with 7.5PB (6.6%).

South Africans were able to download their chunk of gaming glory at an average rate of 1.7Mbps – a far stretch from the US’s 12Mbps average and Russia’s 9.4Mbps.

Still, even the biggest data munchers can’t quite match South Korea’s average download rate: 36.6Mbps.

If you’re still keen to grab some discounted games, the Steam Summer Sale is still on – but today is the last day.

In unrelated news, I’m looking to relocate to Seoul.