Wildly popular

Steam is the world’s most popular destination for PC gaming, so if a game makes it to the top of the platform’s charts, that’s saying something. Recently, EA’s Battlefield 6 launched on October 10 and reached more than 745,000 peak concurrent players. That makes it the No. 14 biggest Steam game of all time based on concurrent players. It’s the second time that Battlefield 6 ranks in the top 20 as well, as the game’s open beta stands at No. 2 with more than 520,000 peak concurrent players.

In this post, we’re rounding up the top 20 most popular games of all time on Steam based on peak concurrent users. The data was supplied by SteamDB.

There are some important things to know about this list. It includes both free-to-play and paid games, along with the non-traditional “game” called Banana where players continuously click the banana until they get a new one.

Another thing to know is that the numbers in this list do not represent a game’s entire reach, as the figures pertain only to Steam games on PC. Plenty of the games on this list are available via other PC storefronts, on console, or Game Pass. Finally, the nature of concurrent players means it’s only a snapshot of one moment in time. The peak gaming hours in North America and Asia, for example, do not overlap.

Finally, you might expect GTA 5 to show up on this list, but it does not, despite being one of the best-selling video games in history. That’s because GTA 5 on PC via Steam recently split into two games–GTA V Legacy and GTA V Enhanced. The peak concurrent records for those games are 364,548 for GTA V Legacy and 187,059 for GTA V Enhanced. Combined, this would amount to more than 551,000 people, which would squeeze into the top 20.