Steam hit a new milestone for concurrent users last week, peaking at just over 8.5 million on January 2. The new peak came at roughly 11 a.m., an hour after Steam’s winter sale came to an end. On January 1, the digital game platform also saw a new high, ringing in 2015 with over 8.4 million people. Valve previously saw a peak of 8.0 million users six months prior, a likely result of the company’s summer sale. The new 8.5 million user peak beats the previous year’s user number of 7.5 million that was recorded on December 26.
While only a small announcement from Valve, some changes were delivered in the most recent Steam beta client build. As of January 2, Steam now reduces CPU usage for drawing animated images or videos, fixed video playback performance for Linux and OS X, and fixed reloading the value of settings in the overlay. Numerous other improvements were made for broadcasting, including audio and video synchronization, capture performance for games that use DirectX 9, automatically adjusting encoding rates and improved Nvidia GPU performance for newer models. Valve also added a frames-per-second counter to the Steam overlay.
