Coronavirus lockdowns have made every day the weekend on Steam

If you look at peak concurrent player numbers on Steam over a year's time, you can usually see clearly where the weekends fall: they're the peaks in a regular sawtooth pattern that shows higher traffic on Saturday and Sunday and lower traffic throughout the work week. Thanks to pandemic-related lockdowns and work-from-home measures, that pattern has largely disappeared for Valve's platform. Pavel Djundik, the creator of SteamDB, pointed out this smoothing of Steam concurrent player peaks in an October 6 tweet. He clipped an image of the graph showing lifetime concurrent players on Steam over a year, which begins with that predictable sawtooth pattern of weekdays and weekends. In mid-March, the pattern changes: there's a major surge to more than 20 million active users, which stays fairly stable day-to-day, gradually tapering off through August and then ticking up again as it moves through September and into October. Steam has been seeing a significant increase in daily active users, which is a trend we took notice of near the beginning of the year. In early February the platform hit an all-time high of 18 million active users - a record it went on to break almost every weekend that followed until passing 20 million by March 15.
Syndicated from here: Coronavirus lockdowns have made every day the weekend on Steam