concurrent users Archives

AppWizard

August 20, 2025

Peak has sold 10m copies

Peak has sold approximately ten million copies to date, with a surge of 1.7 million copies sold in the past week due to a 38 percent discount on Steam. As of last week, it had reached a total of 9.7 million units sold and generated over a million in revenue. Peak was the top-selling game on Steam for the week and ranked as the third highest-grossing title during that period. It is the second indie game to surpass ten million sales, following REPO, which has sold 16.8 million units. After a decline in sales momentum, a price cut introduced eight weeks post-launch revitalized sales, leading to over 550,000 copies sold during the weekend following the discount. The game achieved its highest concurrent player count of 171,000 and recorded over 1.3 million daily active users on the same day.

AppWizard

August 20, 2025

One of 2025’s Biggest Steam Games Now Steam Deck Verified

Dune: Awakening, a survival MMO developed by Funcom, received Steam Deck Verified status two months after its release on June 10, 2025. The game initially attracted 189,333 concurrent users and currently has a fluctuating player base between 20,000 and 47,000. It ranks among the most-played games on Steam this year and is 87th on the all-time concurrent players chart. The game has a “Mostly Positive” rating on Steam, with 74% of 37,547 user reviews favorable, though recent feedback has shifted to a “Mixed” rating with only 53% approval due to player impatience regarding new content. Funcom has implemented updates since launch and provided a roadmap for future developments.

AppWizard

June 27, 2025

FBC: Firebreak hits 1m players

Remedy Entertainment announced that its latest title, FBC: Firebreak, has attracted over one million players as of June 26, just nine days after its launch on June 17. The game is available through subscription services like Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Plus. Data from SteamDB shows a peak of 1,992 concurrent users on Steam. FBC: Firebreak is Remedy's first multiplayer game, initially announced as Project Condor in 2021 and originally set to be published by 505 Games before Remedy decided to self-publish.

Tech Optimizer

June 21, 2025

New OLTP: Postgres With Separate Compute and Storage

Reynold Xin, co-founder of Databricks, highlighted the outdated nature of online transaction processing (OLTP) databases, which have not evolved significantly since the 1990s and face issues like over-provisioning and performance challenges. Databricks is introducing Lakebase, a product that separates compute from storage to enhance the efficiency of transactional databases, particularly for AI applications. Lakebase allows for instantaneous branching of databases, significantly improving workflow efficiency. Built on open-source Postgres, it supports various open storage formats and offers a copy-on-write capability to reduce costs. The separation of compute and storage is essential as streaming data becomes more integral to enterprises, enabling scalability and timely insights. Databricks aims to manage the entire data lifecycle, ensuring data remains within its ecosystem for rapid reporting and analytics. The integration of Lakebase with existing infrastructure enhances developer experience and operational maturity. The architecture supports extensive experimentation at minimal cost, fostering innovation. As AI agents become more prevalent, the focus on data evaluation and reliability will grow, necessitating a deeper examination of model accuracy.

AppWizard

June 16, 2025

Stellar Blade now Sony’s biggest single-player game on Steam

Stellar Blade has become the most successful single-player game from Sony on Steam, achieving a peak of 192,078 concurrent players. It has outperformed other notable titles such as The Last of Us Part 1 (39,496 players), The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered (30,690 users), God of War (83,529 users), and God of War Ragnarök (35,615 users). While Helldivers 2 holds the record for PlayStation-launched games on Steam with 458,709 concurrent users, it is a multiplayer game. Prior to its release on June 11th, Stellar Blade ranked as the sixth highest-grossing game on Steam in pre-orders. Herman Hulst, head of PlayStation Studios, mentioned a cautious strategy for expanding first-party titles to the PC market. Sony has also faced challenges, including layoffs at its Bend Studio after canceling an unannounced live-service title.

AppWizard

May 26, 2025

A Roblox farming game made by a teenager ‘in like three days’ had 8.9 million players online at the same time—Steam peaked at 11.5 million across all games on the same day

In 2025, the Roblox game "Grow a Garden" experienced a peak of nearly 9 million concurrent players, surpassing the previous record held by Player Unknown's Battlegrounds on Steam by almost threefold. The game reached a peak of 5 million concurrent users just a weekend prior to this achievement. It was developed by a teenage creator in three days and has gained significant popularity, with a player count that surpassed the population of New York City. Despite initial skepticism about player counts, investigations confirmed the game's genuine popularity, driven by strong user retention and community engagement. A Roblox spokesperson noted that the growth is attributed to an authentic community rather than artificial inflation.

Tech Optimizer

May 21, 2025

Achieve up to 1.7 times higher write throughput and 1.38 times better price performance with Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL on AWS Graviton4-based R8g instances

Upgrading to Graviton4-based R8g instances with Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible 17.4 in an Aurora I/O-Optimized cluster configuration results in significant performance improvements. The new instances provide up to 1.7 times higher write throughput, 1.38 times better price-performance, and reduce commit latency by up to 46% on r8g.16xlarge instances and 38% on r8g.2xlarge instances compared to Graviton2-based R6g instances. The Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition now supports AWS Graviton4-based R8g instances and PostgreSQL 17.4, which introduces performance enhancements for I/O-Optimized configurations, optimizing write operations and batch processing. R8g instances offer up to 192 vCPUs and 1.5 TB of memory, supporting larger configurations and providing up to 50 Gbps of network bandwidth. PostgreSQL 17 includes vacuum improvements, eliminates the need to drop logical replication slots during upgrades, and expands SQL/JSON standards. Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible separates compute from storage, enabling independent scaling and maintaining six-way replication for durability, while processing changes as log records to reduce I/O operations. Performance benchmarks using HammerDB show improvements in throughput and commit latency across various workloads. For small workloads on 2xlarge instance size, throughput increased by 50.25% and commit latency improved by 33.87%. For medium workloads on 16xlarge instance size, throughput increased by 30% and commit latency improved by 17.44%. The most significant performance benefits arise from combining hardware upgrades from Graviton2 to Graviton4 with database engine upgrades from PostgreSQL 15.10 to 17.4. For small workloads, throughput increased by 70% and commit latency improved by 38.71%. For medium workloads, throughput increased by 70% and commit latency improved by 46.67%. Cost efficiency is also enhanced, with a 38% improvement in price performance and a 61.26% improvement in price-performance ratio when comparing Graviton2 and Graviton4 instances. Reserved Instances for Graviton4-based R8g instances offer additional cost-optimization opportunities.

Tech Optimizer

May 20, 2025

Running I/O intensive workloads on PostgreSQL with Amazon EBS io2 Block Express

Databases are essential for organizations, and their performance is critical to user experience and operational efficiency. AWS introduced Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) io2 Block Express in December 2020 to address performance issues related to storage latency during database operations. This solution enhances storage management for high-performance database servers, supporting up to 256,000 IOPS and 4,000 MiB/s throughput per volume, with a maximum volume size of 64 TiB and sub-millisecond disk I/O latency. A performance comparison was conducted between PostgreSQL databases on Amazon EBS gp3 and io2 Block Express, utilizing the HammerDB benchmarking tool. The analysis involved four tests: OLTP Load test, OLTP Stress test, OLAP Load test, and OLAP Stress test, using r5b.24xlarge EC2 instances. Results indicated that io2 Block Express outperformed gp3 by 2.08 times in transactions per minute (TPM) and provided significantly lower latency for both OLTP and OLAP workloads. Key differences between gp3 and io2 Block Express include durability, with io2 offering 99.999% durability compared to gp3's 99.8% – 99.9%. The maximum IOPS for gp3 is 16,000, while io2 supports up to 64,000 IOPS. Pricing for gp3 is approximately ,375.36/month, while io2 Block Express costs around ,408/month, reflecting its premium performance capabilities. In benchmarking tests, io2 Block Express demonstrated superior performance, achieving 3.95 times faster average performance than gp3 across all scenarios. It is particularly suitable for mission-critical applications requiring consistent sub-millisecond latency and high durability.

AppWizard

April 22, 2025

CHARTS: RuneScape Dragonwilds debuts at No.2 on Steam

RuneScape: Dragonwilds became the second highest-grossing title on Steam after its launch on April 15th, achieving a peak of 52,641 concurrent users. Counter-Strike 2 remains the top-grossing game, while Schedule 1 dropped to third place. Last Epoch climbed to fifth place after launching its second season of content. REPO held sixth place, Marvel Rivals fell to seventh, and Baldur's Gate 3 rose to eighth. Tempest Rising debuted in tenth place despite technical issues at launch. The Steam Top Ten for the week ending April 22nd includes: 1. Counter-Strike 2, Valve 2. RuneScape: Dragonwilds, Jagex 3. Schedule 1, TVGS 4. Steam Deck, Valve 5. Last Epoch, Eleventh Hour 6. REPO 7. Marvel Rivals 8. Baldur's Gate 3, Larian 9. Tempest Rising

AppWizard

March 27, 2025

Greedfall 2 aims to turn around a disastrous early access launch with a combat overhaul and a big new boat

Developer Spiders has released the first major update for Greedfall 2 to address player feedback on its combat system. The update includes faster attacks, improved animations, enhanced character movement, and a refined target lock system. Additionally, it introduces new content such as the region of Olima, a new companion, and the Hub for managing parties and accessing workshops. The update will make existing saves incompatible, requiring players to start anew. Greedfall 2 has struggled to attract players, peaking at 375 concurrent users compared to over 16,000 for the original game.