It turns out that people really like video games, actually, as both Marvel Rivals and Steam had some pretty ridiculous numbers this weekend.
Did you know video games are popular? Who could have guessed! Certainly not me, a games journalist, who writes about them for a living. And yet here we are, with Marvel Rivals continuing to prove incredibly successful after kicking things off with a player count of 444,000 just hours after it launched (which was upped to 480,990 on Steam yesterday by the way), the game’s official Twitter account shared that it had reached 10 million players total… in only 72 hours. Pretty wild numbers, but honestly with Marvel being even more popular than it already was when Overwatch first launched back in 2016, the fusing of the two seemed like a match destined for success.
It’s not just Marvel Rivals that’s doing well on Steam by the way, but Steam itself. It was only just this past September that Valve broke another concurrent user count on Steam with more than 38,360,000 players logged into the digital video game storefront at once, but this weekend the client saw that upped all the way to 39,200,000 (via SteamDB). Now I’m not very good at maths, but even I can see that’s an increase of almost one million, which again, is quite ridiculous! And clearly puts Steam on track to reach 40,000,000 concurrent users within the next few months, at the rate it keeps breaking records.
Just to be clear, this doesn’t mean 39,200,000 were all playing games at once, it’s just the amount of people logged in at once, but it still shows how well Steam is doing (and makes it even less surprising that Valve is facing a class action lawsuit). Video games! People love ’em.