The number of concurrent players, which at time of publishing is listed as having peaked at 445,546, comes less than 24 hours after the game’s release. The previous record was held by GTA V, which after three days on the Steam marketplace saw a peak of about 280,000 concurrent players. Before that, the title was held by Bethesda’s Skyrim, which despite a 2011 release is still just shy of the top 10 games on Steam. GTA V continues to sit in the top 10, but has since fallen to newer titles.
Of course, neither game can touch the unstoppable power that is Dota 2, which is listed as having 760,315 peak concurrent players in the last 24 hours. It’s trailed by Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, with 585,510 peak players in the last day. Both of those games have been out for more than two years, but they’re also titles that have a large professional following and bring people to the Steam platform just to play them.
And really, it’s not terribly surprising to anyone that Fallout 4 is one of the most popular games of the year. There hasn’t been a post-apocalyptic Fallout title since 2010’s New Vegas, with seven years since Fallout 3, the last major sequel. It’s also a game that lends itself to an enormous amount of hype, even without help of a major movie, as enjoyed by Star Wars: Battlefront. That force-powered EA title is just around the corner, but it is sold through the Origin service rather than Steam, so we’ll never know how its popularity compares.
