Player statistics return with a vengeance

Every Steam game now listed :: July 17th, 2008 :: General :: 17 Responses

Steam’s player statistics were taken down the other week, to a small amount of wailing and teeth gnashing in the forums. Now they’re back, and better than ever.

Because every damn game on Steam is up there.

Valve are tracking the statistics from the Steam client instead of their master servers now, enabling absolutely everyone to be counted: from the one person playing RIP 3 to the 61 enjoying Bioshock. All that’s missing are mods.

There is an additional discovery waiting beyond the realisation that the stats no longer include those playing pirated games. Could that change be behind the precipitous drop of Counter-Strike 1.6, which now trails CS Source by some ten thousand players? It’s been suggested that the massive piracy of the former in Asia was inflating the actual figures of legitimate players — although it’s arguable that they should be included to create a full picture. There’s something for Zeh to ponder over.

We might not have any sales figures, but at least we now have the most accurate and broad set of playing figures in the world!

Tags: piracy, stats

17 Responses to this post:

Comments

July 18th, 2008 at 2:52 am ::
FunkyHippo Says:

Sorry but this site is useless. Please try again.
July 18th, 2008 at 9:52 am ::
Tomer A. Says:

Hippo – it’s working for me…

Anyway i’ve noticed that a few weeks ago and like you guys the first i’ve noticed was the huge drop in the number of cs players, which before used to peak over 200,000 (!) players.
But I admit I didn’t thought about piracy but it does make sense, last year I was traveling for a long time in South America and in every internet cafe (and have them everywhere) people were playing a pirated version of CS.
BTW – they just added a “Peak Today” column.
July 18th, 2008 at 8:10 pm ::
idiot_ass Says:

Where are all the modifications? … Stats for mods were my main reason to visit that site.

Anyways still interesting to analyze.
July 23rd, 2008 at 10:02 am ::
demm Says:

Very interesting.
This shows how strong Steam’s residency factor is. I summed up all the current players in all games and got ~72.000, but the number of currently online Steam clients is ~600.000.
It would be intersting how those figures look at a different time of the day.
July 29th, 2008 at 4:55 pm ::
AciD Says:

Those stats looks very good, shame that mods were removed.
Score for Valve!
September 3rd, 2008 at 9:27 pm ::
brent Says:

bs…. it says that 10 players are on the original CoD. There are a hell of a lot more than that
September 4th, 2008 at 12:42 am ::
Andy Simpson Says:

10 people who bought CoD on steam online now. Doesn’t include anyone else.

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