Maybe a bit of a nothing burger, but I thought is was an interesting stat.

For the first time in Steam‘s history, more than 10 million players were playing in-game at the same time.
As noted on Twitter by SteamDB, Valve‘s PC games platform crossed 10 million concurrent in-game players for the first time on Saturday January 7, hitting a peak of 10,082,055.
This was then surpassed again the following day, hitting a peak of 10,284,568.
During the same period the service also hit a new all-time peak of overall concurrent users, reaching a high point of 33,078,963.

Source

1 year ago

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With those numbers I always wonder how different they'd look without Steam Trading cards and bots farming them. If Steam has an idea of how big their share is?

1 year ago*
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You really think bots would make up a sizeable portion of that 10m? I'm not convinced and would guess (uneducated guess!) that it can't be more than a few 100 thousand at most?

1 year ago
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there are people that have 10+ bots as 1 person, you would be surprised how many there are (no clue but could be more than you think) and also enough people that have for example idle games open and are not even there right now...

1 year ago
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If I take my friendslist as an example I'm pretty sure that more than 5% of the total playtime is gathered by bots. Could be even 20%.or more, as there are some very extreme candidates with 1k hours in the past two weeks.
So I have literally no idea about the general situation.

1 year ago
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I think that's very much a "people who hang around places like SG"-type thing, rather than a general one. The vast majority of people I know have no idea that you even do such a thing as farm Steam cards, let alone how to do it.

I'd be very surprised if card farming even put a dent in those numbers. I am certain it's a very, very niche thing.

1 year ago
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Auto clicker games?.........

1 year ago
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Yes and also bots in MMO-s and other online games.

1 year ago
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why would ppl use bots in mmo and other games ?

1 year ago
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To farm any kind of resources, grind basic tasks etc. etc. etc.

1 year ago
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Happy Cakeday!

1 year ago
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Happy cakeday! 🍰

1 year ago
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There are a few mini-documentaries covering things like bots in Oldschool Runescape. You can legit make more money through botting in that game than you would make with an actual job in some countries by real-world trading for the money and items you gained through botting.

(P.S. HAPPY CAKE DAY!)

1 year ago
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Hard to tell how impactful bots are. I would say the vast majority of Steam users have 1 account and don't farm cards, but the 'few' people with bots could be running lots of bots (dozens? hundreds? thousands?)

Average streak is 9 days, and most bots are probably active 24/7 so I think they don't have a huge impact on the overall stats. I tried doing some math with the limited data available and, if I did the math right, it looks like there are less than 727,010 bots (assuming bots have 365 day streaks, and using peak concurrent users as a minimum total population with 1 day as the minimum streak.)

(botStreak(bots) + realStreak(totalPop-bots))/totalPop = 9
botStreak = 365, realStreak = 1, totalPop = 33,078,963

1 year ago*
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And 4 of those players were playing Bad Rats

1 year ago
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Proof, if proof were needed, that it's truly an evergreen classic.

1 year ago
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Deleted

This comment was deleted 1 year ago.

1 year ago
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It's good to know that their servers can actually take the load nowadays instead of just melting or whatever used to happen back in the day when everyone logged in at the same time.

1 year ago
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thanks to aliexpress graphics cards...

1 year ago
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I think the steam deck and the holidays really boosted that? My SD has got me playing more games in the last few months then I did in the last 3 years.

1 year ago
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Steam Deck you think? I don't think it's big enough to have that kind of impact.

1 year ago
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