There was an error on Steam with interesting consequences. Resourceful users were able to read the exact player numbers of almost all games on Steam.
The actual player numbers of games are an interesting metric often indicating the success of a game. Recently, there was a leak on Steam, which resourceful users could use to draw direct conclusions about the player counts of all games that have achievements.
How did the leak occur? Anyone accessing the Steam API could extract valuable data from the game’s achievements. The percentages of players who achieved an accomplishment were accurately reported, up to the 16th decimal place. From this, it was possible to perfectly backtrack how many players a game has.
Caution when analyzing the data. However, one should take these numbers with caution. Essentially, these figures only indicate how many times a game has been downloaded. They say nothing about the actual active players – this can be clearly illustrated by the example of Evolve, which boasts 4,826,928 players, yet barely 200 people play it simultaneously.
Some examples from the data. To give you a better picture of the scale of some games, we have highlighted a few numbers from the data.
|
Team Fortress 2 |
50,191,347 players |
|
Counter Strike: Global Offensive |
46,305,966 players |
|
PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS |
36,604,134 players |
|
Warframe |
16,334,217 players |
|
Paladins |
14,371,946 players |
|
Grand Theft Auto V |
12,604,123 players |
|
War Thunder |
9,536,732 players |
|
Rust |
9,147,240 players |
|
Trove |
7,700,319 players |
|
Warface |
6,656,284 players |
|
Dead by Daylight |
5,757,369 players |
The data is from July 4, 2018.
Anyone interested in the complete dataset can download the CSV file from Arstechnica; the link can be found in our sources.
What do you think of these numbers? An interesting matter that provides more information about the actual size of a game? Or hardly meaningful since it has no relevance to the actual player count?
