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Steam broke some huge all-time high records over the weekend

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A sign that Steam as a release platform and store continues to grow, over the weekend two big concurrent user records were totally smashed.

When it comes to concurrent users online on Steam at any one time, the record has been broken multiple times over this year, most likely boosted by the numbers of people staying at home due to the COVID19 pandemic. Around 20 hours ago Steam hit a new peak of 24,804,148 people. 

Looking over SteamDB, the lifetime concurrent users on Steam shows pretty clear growth. You can also see the clear surge in April, dipping down in August and now surging again:

The other record that was smashed across this weekend is players actually in game. For the first time, ever, Steam had over 1 million players in 2 games at the same time. This was Cyberpunk 2077 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, both rather different games making it clear that singleplayer and online multiplayer can existing together peacefully. Well, sort of anyway, until you look at the rest of the top most played games on Steam being multiplayer titles too.

I actually thought there were more games that hit 1 million together before, but nope, this was a first.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Misc, Steam, Valve
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Koopacabras Dec 14, 2020
it surprises me taking into account how buggy Cyberpunk currently is. It's a bad sign that devs are getting away with buggy releases imho.


Last edited by Koopacabras on 14 December 2020 at 12:10 pm UTC
slaapliedje Dec 14, 2020
Quoting: The_Aquabatit surprises me taking into account how buggy Cyberpunk currently is. It's a bad sign that devs are getting away with buggy releases imho.
Yeah, my first side mission, I spent like 3 min trying to figure out why the person I was supposed to kill was stuck behind a wall I couldn't get to. Finally gave up and started hearing how buggy it was.
Also seeing the exact same model of characters walking around the town was kind of odd.
slapin Dec 14, 2020
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It is not amusing how much problems Cyberpunk 2077 has on Linux, but it is amusing that it was working from first day!
Thanks you for your great work Valve!
drlamb Dec 14, 2020
Yeahhhh...I attempted to start Cyberpunk 2077 on Stadia. The bugs give me major pause and if it were not for the free stadia premier edition deal for purchasing CP2077 I'd have refunded it. It's not like I don't have a bajillion other games in my backlog to play though first (cough: The witcher 3). Performance on Stadia in either mode is rather impressive all things considered.


Oh well, by the time this game is worth it I will hopefully have a 6900 XT. I'll likely re-buy the game on steam around that time if it improves.
Mohandevir Dec 14, 2020
Don't know what it means in absolute numbers but...

https://9to5google.com/2020/12/13/stadia-cyberpunk-premiere-edition-ended/

I was on the fence of taking advantage of this promotion too.. Too bad! Better luck next time!
gbschenkel Dec 14, 2020
For get some performance out of Cyberpunk 2077, check this thread:
https://reddit.com/r/cyberpunkgame/comments/kccabx/hey_cd_projekt_red_i_think_you_shipped_the_wrong/
Beamboom Dec 14, 2020
I'll purchase CP2077 the very same day the affirmative reports starts rolling on at protondb in regards to running well on Nivida.

It may take a patch or two, both from CDPR and Nvidia - but that day will come, and I will be ready.
eldaking Dec 14, 2020
Quoting: The_Aquabatit surprises me taking into account how buggy Cyberpunk currently is. It's a bad sign that devs are getting away with buggy releases imho.

There isn't any issue that can't be circumvented by throwing truckloads of cash into marketing (this is the basis of our society) - the hype for this was absurd, there was no doubt it was going to be huge. They delayed just enough that it wasn't unstable enough to spiral out of control in a vicious cycle of bad press, and then tried to overcome any problems by sheer size. Sure, thousands of people will be turned away, but they have millions.

And also, spending money into easily scalable things like high-fidelity 3D graphics (get render farms and more artists, probably contracted from other companies) or more content (story, enemies, places, quests, items, etc). You can't necessarily just solve a bug faster by hiring more and more programmers to look at the same piece of code, or by giving the same programmers more cash, but you can throw money at other things to dazzle people into letting it slide. On a related note, you might get negative press by abusing your workers, but is it cheaper to pay for more marketing/PR or to not abuse the workers?

I'm just a bit disappointed that so many people are buying the game instead of downloading the illegal "Hacker Edition". I mean, it makes sense thematically, doesn't it?
Ehvis Dec 14, 2020
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Quoting: gbschenkelFor get some performance out of Cyberpunk 2077, check this thread:
https://reddit.com/r/cyberpunkgame/comments/kccabx/hey_cd_projekt_red_i_think_you_shipped_the_wrong/

This one is actually pretty interesting. It seems to me that these sorts of values should be dynamic and based on the particular PC it runs on. They should also be different for the latest generation consoles. If the game actually does run on very conservative defaults, this says a lot about how badly they ran out of time.
M@GOid Dec 14, 2020
It could be simply their lack of time to fix everything before launch, but it makes you wonder that 2 thing occurred in this launch:

- SMT is disabled when a Ryzen CPU is detected, leading to worse performance compared to their Intel counterparts. Some enterprising gamers managed to re-enable it using a Hex editor on the game executable;
- Ray Tracing is also disabled on AMD GPUs.

Together with the Hardware Unboxed scandal over RT coverage, makes you wonder if it didn't have a Nvidia finger on this wrecked launch, since they sponsored it.


Last edited by M@GOid on 14 December 2020 at 8:32 pm UTC
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