At the height of its holiday sale season, Valve Corporation’s Steam client has broken its old usage records by peaking at over 8.3 million concurrent users last weekend.

When Steam was first released over a decade ago, Valve’s content delivery platform was not exactly popular with gamers, who found the system to be unstable and difficult to use. Previously, a server outage only affected small numbers of users on specific games, but much like issues that plague some of today’s popular titles, Steam outages would cause many games to be unplayable.

Over time, Valve adapted its approach to Steam to improve stability and make content more easily accessible.

In an often-cited 2011 interview with The Cambridge Student, Valve founder and owner Gabe Newell famously explained his goal of making Steam a more attractive option than software piracy.

“Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem,” Newell said. “Most DRM solutions diminish the value of the product by either directly restricting a customers use or by creating uncertainty. Our goal is to create greater service value than pirates, and this has been successful enough for us that piracy is basically a non-issue for our company.”

With Valve’s focus on improving user experience and streamlining the game purchase and download process, Steam’s early growing pains were quickly forgotten, and it went on to become one of the most successful content delivery platforms on the market.

Steam’s success lead to other companies creating similar platforms, such as Electronic Arts’ Origin and Ubisoft’s Uplay. But unlike Origin and Uplay, Steam provides access to games produced by a wide variety of developers and publishers rather than only their own products.

Steam’s new record high came during its annual Steam Holiday Sale, a two week event with daily price cuts as high as 90 percent for popular games. Steam’s sales have become a gaming tradition, with players speculating weeks in advance of exactly when the sale will begin. There are even fan-made flowcharts, such as this one by Reddit user /u/Malorajan, to help gamers decide when they should buy a game they want and when they should wait.