Steam Concurrent Players Monitor

Track how many people are playing games on Steam: right now, today, and over the years. Steam's own live charts, a live count for any game, monthly and hourly history, a long-tail ranking of ~12,700 games, and the total number of Steam users online. All from one actor.

Schedule it (for example every hour) and every record also tells you how much the player count changed since the previous run, with an optional alert flag for big swings.

What you can collect

Mode	What you get	Requests
Live top 100 by current players (topConcurrent)	Steam's live "Most Played" chart: players in-game now, today's peak, name, developer, release date	1
Top 100 by daily peak (topDailyPeak)	Yesterday's peak per game, plus its rank a week earlier	1
Live player count for my games (appsCurrent)	Live players for any game you list, optionally plus 24h peak, all-time peak and 30-day average	1 per game
Player history for my games (appHistory)	Monthly average / gain / peak since launch, plus daily and hourly points	2 per game
Long-tail ranking (steamchartsTop)	Up to ~12,700 games ranked by current players, with 30-day peak and hours played	1 per 25 games
Total Steam users online (steamOnline)	Users logged in to Steam now, 48h peak and low, 5-minute series	1

Games can be given as an appid (730), a Steam store / SteamCharts / SteamDB link, or just a name (Elden Ring).

Example input

{
    "mode": "appsCurrent",
    "apps": ["730", "https://store.steampowered.com/app/570/Dota_2/", "Elden Ring"],
    "includeSteamchartsStats": true,
    "compareWithPrevious": true,
    "alertChangePct": 20
}

Example output

topConcurrent (real record, 2026-10-10):

{
    "_input": "topConcurrent",
    "_source": "S1-steam-api-concurrent",
    "_scrapedAt": "2026-10-10T21:22:25Z",
    "recordType": "TOP_CONCURRENT",
    "rank": 1,
    "appid": 730,
    "concurrent_in_game": 1047853,
    "peak_in_game": 1404142,
    "name": "Counter-Strike 2",
    "storeUrl": "https://store.steampowered.com/app/730/CounterStrike_2",
    "isFree": true,
    "developers": ["Valve"],
    "publishers": ["Valve"],
    "releaseDate": "2012-08-21T17:00:00Z",
    "lastUpdate": "2026-10-10T21:18:11Z",
    "item": { "...": "raw Steam store item" },
    "previousPlayers": 1047853,
    "playersChange": 0,
    "playersChangePct": 0.0,
    "previousRank": 1,
    "rankChange": 0,
    "previousSnapshotAt": "2026-10-10T21:23:28Z",
    "isNewEntry": false,
    "sameUpstreamSnapshot": true
}

appsCurrent with SteamCharts stats:

{
    "_input": "Elden Ring",
    "_source": "S1-steam-api-current",
    "recordType": "APP_CURRENT",
    "appid": 1245620,
    "player_count": 29280,
    "name": "ELDEN RING",
    "developers": ["FromSoftware, Inc."],
    "publishers": ["FromSoftware, Inc.", "Bandai Namco Entertainment"],
    "releaseDate": "2022-02-24T23:07:58Z",
    "checkedAt": "2026-10-10T21:23:23Z",
    "peak24h": 39449,
    "allTimePeak": 952523,
    "avgPlayersLast30Days": 28190.48
}

appHistory (series and months truncated):

{
    "_input": "730",
    "_source": "S1-steamcharts-app",
    "recordType": "APP_HISTORY",
    "appid": 730,
    "name": "Counter-Strike 2",
    "currentPlayers": 1122810,
    "currentPlayersAt": "2026-10-10T20:01:55Z",
    "peak24h": 1402441,
    "allTimePeak": 1818368,
    "months": [
        {"month": "Last 30 Days", "avgPlayers": 810166.22, "gain": 4528.4, "gainPct": 0.56, "peakPlayers": 1450705},
        {"month": "September 2026", "avgPlayers": 805637.82, "gain": -19619.98, "gainPct": -2.38, "peakPlayers": 1450705},
        "... 170 more"
    ],
    "series": [
        {"timestamp": "2012-07-01T00:00:00Z", "players": 1642, "resolution": "monthly"},
        "... 948 more"
    ],
    "seriesPoints": 949
}

steamOnline:

{
    "recordType": "STEAM_ONLINE",
    "label": "Steam users logged in",
    "usersOnline": 32606690,
    "usersOnlineAt": "2026-10-10T21:13:25Z",
    "peak48h": 42789427,
    "peak48hAt": "2026-10-10T14:42:46Z",
    "low48h": 25153899,
    "low48hAt": "2026-10-08T23:38:51Z",
    "seriesPoints": 604
}

Inputs that cannot be processed still produce a row with recordType: "ERROR" and a reason (not_found, not_tracked, invalid_input, ...), so you can always see which games failed and why.

Monitoring (change detection)

With Compare with previous run on (the default), the actor remembers each game's number per mode in the named key-value store steam-players-monitor-snapshots and adds:

• previousPlayers, playersChange, playersChangePct: movement since the last run
• previousRank, rankChange: positive means the game climbed
• isNewEntry: the game wasn't in the previous snapshot (new on the chart)
• sameUpstreamSnapshot: Steam hadn't refreshed its data since your last run, so a 0 change means "no new data", not "no movement"
• alert: the change is at least Alert threshold (%)

Steam refreshes the live chart every few minutes and the daily-peak chart once a day; SteamCharts refreshes about hourly. Scheduling more often than that only repeats the same numbers.

Good to know

• Two sources, slightly different numbers. Live counts (topConcurrent, appsCurrent) come straight from Steam's official API. History, 24h/all-time peaks and the long-tail ranking come from SteamCharts, which reads Steam about once an hour, so its "current" figure can be up to an hour old.
• SteamCharts does not track every game. Some new releases are missing (e.g. AION 2, #3 on Steam at test time). appHistory returns not_tracked for them; appsCurrent still returns the live count.
• History resolution (as of October 2026): monthly from launch until mid-2026, then daily, then hourly for the last ~30 days.
• Official charts stop at 100 games. Use steamchartsTop for anything below the top 100.
• No login, no proxy needed. None of the endpoints used is blocked or rate-limited at normal volumes. The proxy setting is there only for very large, very frequent jobs.

Technical notes

• WAF: none on any surface (api.steampowered.com, store.steampowered.com, steamcharts.com), tested 2026-10-11. Even a bare Python client gets HTTP 200; 100 parallel API calls drew no 429s. curl_cffi with the chrome124 TLS profile is used as insurance, rotating to safari17_0 / firefox133 / edge101 and a new exit IP if a gate ever appears.
• Endpoints: ISteamChartsService/GetGamesByConcurrentPlayers and GetMostPlayedGames (with input_json.data_request, so names come in the same call), ISteamUserStats/GetNumberOfCurrentPlayers, IStoreBrowseService/GetItems (batches of 100), store/api/storesearch for name lookup, store/stats/userdata.json, steamcharts.com/app/{id}, /app/{id}/chart-data.json and /top/p.{n}.
• Quirk: GetMostPlayedGames accepts top_played_period but ignores it (every value returns the same daily ranking), so it isn't exposed.
• SteamDB is intentionally not used: its terms prohibit automated access.