Steam hits new peak with 12M playing over New Year's

Steam had a huge, record-breaking weekend, setting a new peak for concurrent users on Jan. 3. The Steam and Game Stats graph shows that just before 2 p.m. ET yesterday, more than 12 million users were actively logged in and playing games, setting a new bar for Valve's service.

12,332,504 is listed as the exact number of users, way up from the high of 8.5 million concurrents posted this time last year. Last New Year's weekend's numbers represented a peak then, with the previous best of 8 million concurrent users recorded more than six months earlier in June 2014.

The final days of this year's Winter Sale likely helped drive users to Steam this weekend — coupled with the intriguing alternate reality game that Reddit users uncovered just before the New Year and have been working to crack ever since.