Everyone seemed to be gaming this past Thanksgiving weekend

This story about gaming on holidays, boiled down, in 1:10 minutes.

What's the fuss?

Thanksgiving is a time for eating, family, and apparently video games. A gaming platform has broken its record for concurrent players during the weekend, evidence that gaming isn't going anywhere despite decreasing social restrictions.

The situation

Autumn is a big time for Steam, the largest digital video game marketplace and platform in the world.

• Steam's Autumn Sale, which coincidentally corresponds with Thanksgiving in the U.S., provides gamers with heavy discounts on recently released games.
• Gamers can get up to 90% off, and combined with the free time the national holiday provides - it's the perfect gaming storm.

This Thanksgiving holiday, Steam broke its own record for the number of concurrent players using the service, reaching 27,384,959 gamers.

• The record represents the highest number of players logged on to the platform.
• Only 7,835,499 of these players were actually playing a game at the time of record.

Boiling it down

Social restrictions as a result of COVID-19 boosted player numbers on Steam (as well as on other platforms) by a lot.

• However, with these social restrictions slowly lifting, it's clear that the love of gaming hasn't gone anywhere.
• Throughout the pandemic, concurrent players on Steam have rarely dropped below 20 million since March 2020.

Steam's record-breaking achievement isn't a testament to their service necessarily, but to the games that are hosted on it.

• The service seeing many recent high-profile releases, such as Halo Infinite, as well as steep sales discounts has undoubtedly led to this record-breaking weekend.

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