Valve’s Steam service has once again reached an all-time high for concurrent online players, and this is likely due to a number of different factors. Earlier in the day, SteamDB recorded that the service had 36,928,521 online players. Officially, Steam’s own numbers show that I amFor a record of 36,905,706 players today. Both of these numbers beat the previous record of 36,354,393 simultaneous players, set in mid-March 2024.

The biggest factor in this new online player record is that it happened in the middle of Steam’s summer sale. The vast majority of games on the service have at least some price reduction, with some dropping as much as 95 percent off their regular prices. The sale is scheduled to run until July 11th, so we may see the record number of simultaneous players rise even further next weekend.

Some games on Steam have received some additional player boosts due to factors other than their low price. Microsoft announced this earlier this week Forza Horizon 4 Will be deleted from digital stores on December 15th. This announcement, plus an 80 percent discount, caused the game to receive a huge boost in sales and online players.

Falworld, which became a huge hit on Steam earlier this year, just released its first major content update earlier this week, with new “Pals,” a new location, and other features. As a result, its online player count has dropped from 31,000 concurrent gamers earlier this week to more than 140,000 players on Sunday, according to SteamDB.

Another possible factor for the increase in the number of players is the launch of game recording for Steam. This new feature allows Steam players to capture gameplay footage and offers ways to edit the videos and then share them with others. The feature even works with Valve’s Steam Deck gaming console.