With millions of people at home either quarantined or self-isolating due to the coronavirus (COVID-19), online gaming services are seeing unprecedented numbers online at any given time. SteamDB, for instance, recently reported a massive surge in concurrent player numbers. Over this past weekend, more than 20 million players were using Steam and over 6 million were playing games. While this is not a record, it is likely that these numbers will rise as more and more people around the world are at home to lessen the spread of COVID-19.
Eurogamer is reporting that Counter-Strike: Global Offensive benefited from the increased player-base with a record-setting million players taking part concurrently. That number shatters the previous concurrent user record that has stood since 2012.
GamesIndustry.biz is also reporting that this past weekend’s Xbox Live downtime was due to increases in player concurrency. Xbox’s Phil Spencer said in a tweet that the outage was due to the service being overloaded but thanked engineers for a quick resolution.
Yea, usage is up on almost everything. Thanks go out to all the Ops/IT teams at all the companies that are working hard to keep everything running smoothly with all going on around them.
— Phil Spencer (@XboxP3) March 15, 2020
What are you playing while you’re at home?
