Valve Leaks Steam Player Numbers

Developers and Publishers have often had the upper hand when it comes to tracking player numbers and the data that comes with it. For many though, publically attainable data on player numbers is hard to come by, with most Publishers unwilling to reveal exactly how many, or how few, players their game has. Steam is no different, with Valve looking to do everything they can to keep the exact figures under wraps.

Still, as Jeff Goldblum once said in Jurassic Park, “Life finds a way.” And life certainly seemed to have conspired against Valve when it comes to keeping player figures in the dark. A new way to see how many people were / are playing the games on Steam was revealed just a few weeks ago, and while Valve has since closed the loophole that made this method work, the data still slipped through for some time.

Tyler Glaiel, a developer who worked on games such as Closure and The End Is Nigh, wrote a pretty interesting piece on how this method works. The article outlines the way in which he was able to use the data to track the percentages of players who had reached specific achievements in games that supported the feature, and extrapolate the player numbers from that figure. The result is a very accurate picture of how many people have been, and are, playing games on the service. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work when tracking games that didn’t support the achievement API that he was working with, but the outcome does mean that we can see player figures for about 13,000 of the games on Steam, which is a pretty good number compared to the rough estimate of around 23,000 total games on the service.

So what did we learn from the data that was found. Well, for starters the game that has had the most unique players is a lot older than you might think. The game that registers the most unique players is actually Team Fortress 2, coming in at 50,191,347 players over the years. It’s followed fairly closely behind by Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, which clocked in at 46,305,966 players. That seems to make sense, with both games being on the system for quite a few years now. PUBG comes in at 3^rd place, with 36,604,134 players, which is pretty good for a game that is comparatively recent. You can find a list of the games at this arstechnica article, here.

It should be obvious that these numbers are only reflective of the Steam player base, rather than the number of players who enjoy these games as a whole. Games that are on multiple platforms will obviously have much larger numbers, but it is interesting to see that it is possible for Developers to work out the exact figures when given the necessary information, though it would be easier if Valve simply released the data wholesale.