Who said PC Gaming was dying? Steam recently announced that its popular PC client hit 6.6 million concurrent users, last Sunday. This, compared to the figure in 2012’s January, where its concurrent users stood at 5 million, means a mean growth rate of 300% that it was last year.
Most player traffic is coming from the immensely popular (yet unreleased, still in Beta) DOTA 2. Much of the iLL Gaming is staff is hooked on to DOTA 2 itself, and personally I have stacked 150 hours of game time. We have to give props to Valve for making an excelled DOTA game. Team Fortress 2, Steam’s long running most played game was beaten by Dota 2 six months back, in concurrent users, although it couldn’t pass TF2’s daily peak. Things have changed now. Dota 2 now stands way ahead of TF2 with a peak concurrent total of 237,414 players. Mind you, this is still second place. Dota 2’s younger sister League of Legends (LOL) still holds an affirmative No. 1 spot, in concurrent peak terms. LOL reported 3 million concurrent users in July 2012. Much of Dota 2’s success can be credited to Steam’s aggressive aggregation of Free Keys. Dota 2 is free-to-play!
Another surprising yet commendable stat, Football Manager 2013 is also enjoying a brush of success, with a concurrent peak maxing out at 78,488. FIFA 2013 and PES 2013 is are not enough to fulfill a football fanatic’s appetite, it seems.
Summing up, this is a great sign in general of PC gaming. PC gaming has been going more assertive in its presence lately. And with the specs leak of the upcoming next generation consoles PS 4 (codenamed Orbis) and Xbox 720 (codenamed Durango), it is clearly evident that current high-end PC’s easily pawn the consoles in terms of raw processing power.
Source: PC Gamer
