Valve’s digital distribution service Steam keeps surging in popularity, setting new records for users nearly every month. After hitting 16 million online gamers in October, the lure of Black Friday deals (with an assist from a little game called PlayerUnknown Battlegrounds that you may have heard of) resulted in a new high, with 17,683,804 users signed in simultaneously.
According to the tracking data over at SteamDB, the number of online players reached a high of 6,813,617. Those were people actively playing games, rather than just idly browsing through the deals on the site. Of those, nearly half (2,940,359) were enjoying some frenzied multiplayer action in PUBG.
The total number of actual Steam users is harder to track, as many have multiple accounts and others have been dormant for years. In 2014, Steam announced that it had reached 75 million users, and then boasted more than 125 million “active” accounts at an event in 2015. Still, it’s hard to deny that Valve’s downloadable games service has become a near-universal platform for PC gaming.
According to Steam’s figures from earlier this year, more than 25 million Steam users have gaming rigs that are ready for virtual reality. That figure has nearly doubled since 2016, indicating that widespread adoption of VR as a gaming platform may be right around the corner.
As far as the actual games on the service go, the 800-pound gorilla in the room is PUBG at nearly 3 million, Dota 2 comes in second with a peak of 1.2 million, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is a distant third with 850k. It’s worth noting that PUBG reached its peak in 2017, while the other two topped out in 2016. As PCGamesN notes, the number of PUBG players is likely to explode well past 3 million once the game releases the new desert map and then expands into Asian markets after the recent deal with Chinese publisher Tangent.
Valve has recently made its service more open to indie developers with the Steam Direct project. Gamers can also opt for projects that are still in development with Early Access, providing feedback to the developers and participating in discussions as the game reaches its final iteration.
Steam looks to be a juggernaut in PC gaming, at least for the foreseeable future, as it shows no signs of slowing down.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.