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Valve hasn't released a few official Steam figures in several years, but reasonable math from a reputable source reckons the biggest store in PC gaming is hovering around 200 million monthly active users, which would make it more than 50% larger than the entire PlayStation platform.

This soft figure comes from Simon Carless' GameDiscoverCo newsletter . Carless used some pretty basic math and alternate data sources to estimate Steam's growth over the past few years, and we can check it ourselves with some equally simple arithmetic based on Valve's 2025 Steam report.

Carless notes that Steam's Digital Services Act notice affirms that the store had "an average of 31.1 million monthly active recipients" in the EU as of the second half of 2025 (this has been cited elsewhere as well). He used this figure as a base to compare the EU's Steam audience to the store's entire demographic, and for that he consulted Steam's public bandwidth chart, which tracks how much data is used where.

Already, caveats come into play. We don't know exactly how much activity makes someone a monthly active user (MAU) under these terms – for example, playing a game versus viewing the homepage or one Steam sale link – nor will bandwidth usage perfectly correlate with user distribution.

However, the math, with non-EU countries removed from Europe's stats, does roughly line up. Carless notes that this approach puts Steam at around 198 million MAU for the second half of 2025, meaning it may have crossed 200 million by now.

(Image credit: Valve) Now for official stats. In 2021, Valve said Steam had 132 million MAU. This year, the company said Steam had been gaining about 3.4 million concurrent users each year ever since hitting 25 million for the first time five years ago.

Again, we have to make an assumption: that Steam's concurrent users and MAU grew at exactly the same rate, which they surely did not. But they probably weren't massively detached, either, so we can approximate MAU using that rate (3.4 being 13.6% of 25) to plot five years of growth.

The most generous version of this estimation gives us around 213 to 221 million MAU. We see this range because using 2021's peak of 27.4 million concurrent users as a base reduces the growth rate to 12.4%. Either way, this isn't far off Carless' result. He used a similar formula to gauge his findings and got 210 million; I just plugged in a slightly different number based on Valve's blogs.

This method would also give us roughly 44 million concurrent Steam users, which is only about 9% ahead of the actual 41.2 million users that Valve reports in Steam's charts hub . We assuredly don't have the street address right, but we're probably in the right zip code, or at least the right county.

This is an exercise more than anything, and I wouldn't use this kind of soft math if I were building a space shuttle. But, especially given the larger growth in PC gaming versus console gaming , it does seem fair to assume that Steam is around 50% larger than PlayStation.

A recently translated report from Sony confirms PlayStation had 125 million monthly active users in March 2026, which, as a reminder, is below what Steam had five years ago. If we remove a chunk from the most conservative Steam estimate we have, we'd be right in line with the 187 million monthly users we'd need to hit that 50% mark.

Instead of putting its games on PC, Sony apparently wants to escape the reputation that "PlayStation equals the living room" by selling monitors and speakers .

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A team of conservationists has discovered and restored the tombstone of Sebastian, a formerly enslaved man who died free in 1729.

"That discovery is likely one of the oldest gravestones of a free Black person in America," Michelle Wu, the mayor of Boston, said in a July 4 speech . "It's been there all along. We just had to go look and share the story."

The stone marker is inscribed with Sebastian's chosen name, Boston, and features an image common in 17th- and early 18th-century tombstones in New England: the death's head . The symbol includes a stylized skull flanked by wings, which were possibly intended to symbolize spiritual resurrection .

On the tombstone, a simple, five-line inscription reads:

Original Inscription

HERE LYES Y e

BODY OF BOSTON

AGED 70 YEARS

DEC D FEB Y Y e 28

1728

Modern English

HERE LIES THE

BODY OF BOSTON

AGED 70 YEARS

DECEASED FEBRUARY THE 28

1728

In 18th-century American writing, the word "the" was often abbreviated with a Y-shaped letter form called a " thorn " representing the "th" sound. Tombstones also frequently abbreviated "deceased" and the month. Somewhat confusingly, before 1752, the American colonies regularly used the Julian calendar , as did Britain, in which the new year started on March 25. Boston's year of death is listed on the tombstone as 1728, but his February 28 death was actually in 1729 in our modern Gregorian calendar.

Kelly Thomas, the director of the Historic Burying Grounds Initiative for the Boston Parks and Recreation Department, told WBZ News Radio that she identified the gravestone during a restoration project at the Granary Burying Ground , the city's third-oldest cemetery. Established in 1660, the cemetery includes over 5,000 graves, including the final resting places of Declaration of Independence signers Samuel Adams and John Hancock; the U.S. Revolutionary War officer Paul Revere; and Crispus Attucks, a sailor of mixed African and Indigenous ancestry who is thought to be the first American killed in the Boston Massacre.

"I was reviewing the photos of headstones, and then I noticed that the stone only had one name," rather than a first and last name, Thomas told WBZ News Radio, suggesting that Boston was either enslaved or free when he died. Based on a search of historical records, Thomas determined that Boston's enslaved name was Sebastian and that he also went by Bastian.

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A surprising amount of information was recorded about Boston and his wife, Jane Lake. In 1701, they had their daughter, also named Jane, baptized at First Church in Boston, where they regularly attended worship services. But while the two were married with children, they were also both enslaved and lived in different households, historian Gloria Whiting wrote in a 2016 study .

Boston was likely freed in the early 18th century, some time after the 1702 death of John Waite, who had held him in slavery. By 1708, a list of free Black people included the name Boston, and he had gained a reputation in the city as a hardworking handyman, according to Whiting's study. He had been freed for roughly 30 years when he died in 1729 and was well-known enough to have an obituary published for him in the New-England Weekly Journal , a rare occurrence for enslaved or freed Black people in colonial America.

Wu also said that, in recent weeks, archaeologists in Boston had discovered musket balls and gun flints from the infamous Battle of Bunker Hill that took place on June 17, 1775. The battle was fought by British Crown forces and New England troops in the first stage of the American Revolutionary War.

See if you know what these mysterious artifacts are with our archaeological fragments quiz!