There’s an increasing emphasis on Steam concurrent statistics across the industry, because it’s one of the few points of publicly available data we have to determine a game’s success.
But it’s worth remembering that they represent just one platform, and others must also be taken into account.
We heard recently from the devs of Test Drive Unlimited: Solar Crown, who told us not to just focus on Steam concurrents, as PS5 was by far the racer’s biggest platform.
And now we have some interesting data from someone who worked on Highguard, which shows Sony’s system was the biggest platform for the failed FPS as well.
Now none of this meaningfully changes the conversation: Wildlight’s shooter still failed to find a large enough audience across all platforms to sustain itself, and it’s being shut down on 12th March as a consequence.
But the data, which shows the PS5 version was consistently attracting the largest number of players daily since launch, does put the obsession with Steam concurrents into perspective – it’s not the be all and end all, even if it is an interesting individual data point.
At the end of the day, there are games which will perform better on PC, and there are others that will do better on consoles.
Steam concurrents do give us an interesting insight into how well a game’s doing, but they need to be treated as a smaller part of a larger overall picture.