A growing trend in hardcore gaming communities revolves around Steam concurrent player numbers.
As one of the few publicly available measures of a game’s success (or lack thereof), we’ve seen the emphasis on them escalate in recent times.
While they only track the number of people playing a specific title on a single platform at a single moment in time, they’re often used to determine whether a release has been successful or not.
Often the generally accepted barometer for success changes depending on the whims of a particular community. A single player game may be considered a “hit” with a peak of just 20k concurrent players, for example; while a multiplayer game could be labelled a flop with a peak of 80k.
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We don’t get similar data for PlayStation, Xbox, or Nintendo, so we never get a complete picture for a multiformat release.
In the wake of a phenomenon we’re coining ‘Marathon Concurrent Player Watching’, Overwatch dev Dylan Snyder has spoken out about the practice.
Writing on X (or Twitter), he described it all as “big unemployed, maidenless behaviour”, pointing to a post from one user who claimed Marathon had “lost” 50% of its players since launch. It’s actually held relatively steadily.
Another user argued that Marathon’s highs of 88k are significantly lower than its Server Slam’s peak, which hit 140k. But it’s worth noting the Server Slam was free for everyone to try, like a demo, while the full game costs $40.
Obviously, we’re not immune to using Steam concurrent players to highlight a game’s success, but we do think the data needs to be taken in context; it does just represent a single platform and a specific moment in time.
Perhaps there’s an argument here about how much transparency we get from game developers – it certainly would be interesting to know in deeper detail how people are engaging with their games.
But while concurrent players can be a positive marketing tool, they can also have the opposite effect when things don’t go to plan; Concord was always doomed to failure, for instance, but people referencing its concurrent players, in the hundreds, certainly didn’t help.
Ultimately, we think this data can be useful, but it needs to be treated in the right way. We simply don’t know how many people are playing on PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo as well – and that’s a lot of information to be missing from a major multiformat release.