3 Steam hits five million concurrent players

Online-gaming platform Steam breached a record on 2 January this year with a whopping 5 million people logged in on Steam at the same time. The popularity of Skyrim and the Christmas deals were one of the causes for the record.

The statistic-page from Steam shows that on 2 January 2012 a spike of 5.012.654 users was noted. In the week before the new year this record of concurrent players was already broken several times, but on 2 january the 5 million limit was finally reached.

PC Gamer notices that the ongoing succes for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, wich is the most played game in Steam at the moment, and the christmas deals played a big role in setting the new record. Around Christmas each year Steam offers a variaty of games for almost bottomprices, wich causes for a lot of people to finally buy that game they ought to be to expensive at first.

Steam already exists since 2003 and its gameslibrary nowadays contains 1800 games. The total users from Valve's gameservice lies above the 35 million people.

4 Play Skyrim smoother

When i first played the game i was flabbergasted. Not just that it was ENORMOUS and AWESOME, but that my pc could run it. I can still remember Oblivion running and my computer was like okay, but meh. So when the game put everything on high before i could even set it up it raised a question, still it's playing smooth like a just shaven head.

Even better though, an unofficial path-maker named Arisu found a solution to a FPS problem other people do have. I did not test it yet, since i live by the 'if it isn't broken, don't fix' term. Bethesda already patched the game so that it would use more then 2 gigs of ram, but still it isn't enough for a lot of people.

What Arisu has to say about it: “It works mostly by rewriting some x87 FPU code and inlining a whole ton of useless getter functions along the critical paths because the developers at Bethesda, for some reason, compiled the game without using any of the optimization flags for release builds.” Also, “They’d just have to add the string “/O2 /GL” to their Makefile”. 

To install the unofficial patch, first you’ll need to grab the Skyrim Script Extender (SKSE) from here and extract its contents into your main Skyrim directory. Then, grab the TESV Acceleration Layer from here and dump the DLL file within into [your Skyrim folder]/Data/SKSE/Plugins, creating the latter two directories if necessary. Then, launch the game by running skse_loader.exe from the Skyrim root folder.


I hope this works for you peeps out there. Give me a shout if this made your (Skyrim) life even better.