Steam has once again broken its all-time record for concurrent users, reaching an utterly extraordinary 43,505,724 people logged in at the same time. As Eurogamer reports, picking up the numbers from SteamDB, this marks the third time this year that the top figure has been smashed, hitting over 42 million back in January, adding another half-million in March, and now breaking through the 43 million barrier for the first time in the service’s 23 years.

It’s important to note that this isn’t the number of people playing games on Steam simultaneously, but rather the numbers logged in at once. And if you’re a terrible person like me who leaves your PC on overnight, you’re adding to the number of non-playing accounts in those figures. However, SteamDB records that 14.5 million actually were in-game when the record was broken. That too is a record, by an extraordinary half a million more people.

As for where those numbers are coming from, there’s no specific massive spike, but rather the continued gradual accumulation of users. Clearly the release of Gears of War: E-Day will have helped, with around 170,000 sales on Steam , while free-to-play MMO Aion 2 has seen almost 400,000 players showing up all week. They join the usual suspects like Dota 2 and Counter-Strike 2 , which routinely see player counts of over a million, and PUGB with its regular 700,000. The rest, of course, is spread across the 130,000 games currently available on Steam, a figure that goes up by 20,000 a year.

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