GameSpot may receive revenue from affiliate and advertising partnerships for sharing this content and from purchases through links.
Wildly popular
Steam is the world’s most popular destination for PC gaming, so if a game makes it to the top of the platform’s charts, that’s saying something. Recently, Team Cherry’s long-awaited Hollow Knight: Silksong launched on September 4 and rocketed up the charts all the way to No. 18 on launch day with more than 530,000 concurrent players.
In this post, we’re rounding up the top 20 most popular games of all time on Steam based on peak concurrent users. The data was supplied by SteamDB.
There are some important things to know about this list. It includes both free-to-play and paid games, along with the non-traditional “game” called Banana where players continuously click the banana until they get a new one.
Another thing to know is that the numbers in this list do not represent a game’s entire reach, as the figures pertain only to Steam games on PC. Plenty of the games on this list are available via other PC storefronts, on console, or Game Pass. Finally, the nature of concurrent players means it’s only a snapshot of one moment in time. The peak gaming hours in North America and Asia, for example, do not overlap.
Finally, you might expect GTA 5 to show up on this list, but it does not, despite being one of the best-selling video games in history. That’s because GTA 5 on PC via Steam recently split into two games–GTA V Legacy and GTA V Enhanced. The peak concurrent records for those games are 364,548 for GTA V Legacy and 187,059 for GTA V Enhanced. Combined, this would amount to more than 551,000 people, which would squeeze into the top 20.
