COVID Central: Steam, Xbox Live Has Record Usage over the Weekend

With worldwide quarantines on the rise around the globe, either self-enforced or enforced by national governments, people are spending more time indoors than they may have in the past. This is all well and good for some in our audience, but for other people with fruitful social contact, finding ways to spend all their newfound alone time is certainly proving challenging. This challenge has led to an extremely predictable outcome - a lot more people are playing video games.

On Sunday, Steam set two new records with over 20 million people booting the client up in a single day, and up to 6.4 million people playing concurrently. One million of those 6.4 million people were playing Counter-Strike, which is also a new record for that game specifically. Other popular games included DOTA 2 (with over 700k people playing at once), Rainbow Six Siege (sitting at 196k players), Path of Exile (115k players), and Grand Theft Auto V (173k players online).

But people werent just logging into Steam: they were also getting onto Xbox Live in record numbers. Just the other day, Xbox head Phil Spencer confirmed that their servers were getting pushed to their limit by the influx of players.

Yea, usage is up on almost everything. Thanks go out to all the Ops/IT teams at all the companies that are working hard to keep everything running smoothly with all going on around them.

Its safe to assume that the PlayStation Network, and Nintendos online service, is suffering from a similar strain. Unfortunately, much like the disease itself, theres very little reason to suspect this wont get worse before it gets better: more and more people are going to be stuck indoors as the disease gets worse, which means more and more people looking for ways to pass the time.

So brace yourself for outages.