Dota 2 reached 1 million concurrent players this weekend

By Brenna Hillier

Dota 2 has set a new concurrent player record, possibly becoming the first Steam game to reach such an impressive milestone.

This weekend Dota 2 attracted over 1 million concurrent players for the first time. It’s likely the New Bloom Festival was responsible for the new record.

Let’s just let that sink in: there were more than 1 million players logged into Steam playing the same game at the same time. Wow.

To put that in context, Steam itself has concurrent player record of 8 million. Dota 2 is far and away the most popular Steam game, usually pulling twice the players of Counter-strike: Global Offensive, and more than ten times that of the next most popular games.

Dota 2 is, therefore, a phenomenon – but it’s still not in the same realm as League of Legends, which holds a concurrent player record of 7.5 million.

It’s hard to find accurate concurrent player statistics for other games and services like World of Warcraft, which divide their games by servers rather than give overall statistics. However, World of Warcraft has broken 1 million concurrent players on its Chinese servers alone, and had a peak player base of over 12 million in 2010.

Here’s a screen grab of the Steam stats page at time of writing, showing the peak player count earlier today topped 1 million.