Sony has introduced a new feature for gamers and inadvertently made the player counts of many games on PlayStation 4 visible. This has sparked the interest of many people. On MeinMMO, you’ll find out how many players are playing The Elder Scrolls Online, Overwatch, and No Man’s Sky on PS4.
This is how many players are playing the games: The website gamstat.com provides the current player counts for many PS4 games. The data was collected from November 20 to December 3.
- Overwatch: Rank 15 with 10,200,000 players
- The Elder Scrolls Online: Rank 36 with 3,950,000 players
- No Man’s Sky: Also Rank 36 with 3,950,000 players
The player counts are roughly rounded and not exact.
This is how the numbers come about: Sony has introduced a new feature, which allows players to create short clips of their game library. The videos mention some data, like their first game and their rarest trophy.
For the trophies, it is then shown how many players own that trophy. In the games themselves, one can find out the percentage of trophy owners.
From these two numbers, it can be calculated how many players have ever played ESO, Overwatch, or No Man’s Sky and linked it with their PS4 account.
The interest in the numbers
This is why people are interested: Most players just want to know the player counts to find out how popular their favorite games actually are. They don’t gain much more than the assurance of being on trend.
Other players compare the player counts out of pure curiosity with the populations of their countries. In a reddit thread, users are fascinated by the fact that nearly as many people play FIFA 18 as live in Canada.
However, most publishers would probably prefer that the numbers were not public. This allows competitors to see how popular their games are and how their own brands compare.
It’s also not particularly beneficial for the image. Especially for games whose player counts do not look strong, the situation is quite unpleasant.
Are the numbers reliable? An absolute ranking of the most popular and least popular games on PS4 cannot yet be created. Gamstat.com currently lacks some data for that.
For games like H1Z1, player counts are currently only known from the Europe and Australia regions. For others, rounding errors or outdated trophy counts may also play a role.
It is also clear that this refers to the total player counts, meaning all people who have ever acquired an account for the game. It is not the counts of active players who have logged into The Elder Scrolls Online, Overwatch, or No Man’s Sky in recent months or weeks.
This also includes trial accounts that have installed the game for free.
The method itself seems to be reliable. If the trophy numbers from Sony are correct, then the player counts are also likely to be accurate.
What interests you about knowing how many players are playing your favorite games?
