Steam - Game Player Counts

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Spaceman
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@ArsTechnica The player counts for many top ranking Steam games have been deduced from Steam achievements. The loop hole has now been closed but not before some interesting numbers were uncovered for over 13,000 games.

The new data derivation method, as ably explained in a Medium post from The End Is Nigh developer Tyler Glaiel, centers on the percentage of players who have accomplished developer-defined Achievements associated with many games on the service. On the Steam web site, that data appears rounded to two decimal places. In the Steam API, however, the Achievement percentages were, until recently, provided to an extremely precise 16 decimal places.

This added precision means that many Achievement percentages can only be factored into specific whole numbers. (This is useful since each game's player count must be a whole number.) With multiple Achievements to check against, it's possible to find a common denominator that works for all the percentages with high reliability. This process allows for extremely accurate reverse engineering of the denominator representing the total player base for an Achievement percentage.

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More information.
 
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The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim 13,235,488
Terraria 13,132,545

i love the numbers


but i hate them too

ELEX 254,457
Legend of Mysteria (RPG maker trash) 254,231
 
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The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim 13,235,488
Terraria 13,132,545

i love the numbers


but i hate them too

ELEX 254,457
Legend of Mysteria (RPG maker trash) 254,231

If you add normal Skyrim - 13,235,488 and Special Edition 4,398,897 you get the number one game on steam that is only single player. Everything above even the 13 million number is multiplayer/F2P/Co-op etc. Nearly 18 million people on a 7 year old game.
 
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Lets see.

Pillars of Eternity - 1,275,530
Pillars of Eternity 2 - 203,867
Wasteland 2 - 626,811
Original Sin - 1,501,547
Original Sin 2 - 1,688,895
Tyranny - 562,631
Banner Saga - 747,734
Banner Saga 2 - 154,166
Torment:Numenera - 206,681
Baldur's Gate EE - 745,407
Baldur's Gate 2 EE - 420,031
Age of Decadence - 96,114
DeadState - 112,025
Underrail - 84,245
Deus Ex - Mankind Divided - 1,155,405
Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Director's Cut - 1,358,070
The Technomancer - 100,047
Expeditions: Conquistador - 130,612
Expeditions: Viking - 81,722
Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning - 963,308
Dishonored - 3.700.352
Dishonored 2 - 1,127,089
Dishonored: Death of the Outsider - 167,394
Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen - 970.603
Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning - 963,308
The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing: Final Cut - 184.404
Planescape: Torment: Enhanced Edition - 109,926
Masquerada: Songs and Shadows - 6,077

Proof that certain games don't sell well.:disappointed:
 
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I had no idea that the first Banner Saga sold that many copies. Then again, quite a dip for them as far as the second iteration sales went.
 
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I guess this data only captures people who got at least 1 achievement in the game?

It's off by quite a lot for Age of Decadence, we know this because VD regularly updates us on how many he's sold. 140,069 as of Thursday: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...t-in-sales-figures.90695/page-30#post-5698229
So, it's sold 46% more than the number here. The old SteamSpy method was always far more accurate, at least in regards to AoD.

PoE2 may be lower than reality due to a lot of people in the situation of having bought it but holding off playing it because of pre-announced expansions, and patches.

Didn't know Tyranny and Underrail sold as well as the numbers here, nice.
 
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Yeah I mentioned in another thread the data might be 10-30% off. Anyway this is good data for now until Steam implements it's own version of SteamSpy in the future.
 
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I'm sure it never will :shakefist:
They are according to a press event last week.

Link - https://www.engadget.com/2018/06/29/…nt-game-stats/
It looks as though Valve has something up its sleeve to replace Steam Spy. According to PC Games N, Jan-Peter Ewert, the head of business development at Valve, was asked about Steam Spy at a game industry conference. Ewert responded that developers needed "something better than Steam Spy," and that Valve was working on it.

“Our general approach has always been to provide open APIs so that when we don’t offer the amount of tools that we should, the community can step in. We are very much working on new tools and new ways of getting data out of Steam, and we hope that data can be more accurate and more useful than what Steam Spy previously offered you.”
 
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I would be very surprised if they willingly give out data on how many people own games. It's probably other data they're willing to give out. SteamSpy, after all, was about a lot more than just number of buyers.
 
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I would be very surprised if they willingly give out data on how many people own games. It's probably other data they're willing to give out. SteamSpy, after all, was about a lot more than just number of buyers.
True my worry is this new system will only be offered to developers/publishers.
 
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Also, Dungeon Rats is 16134 in this data, but has actually sold 38180 (per VD's post linked above). Off by 2.37X.
 
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Ah good point, not only includes GOG but also the pre-orders he sold which were through BMT Micro or something. Still, everytime I've seen GOG sales compared to Steam sales for any given game (besides CDPR games), the GOG sales are a very tiny %. Wouldn't think they'd have a huge impact.
 
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Depends on game and what you call huge....

Ah good point, not only includes GOG but also the pre-orders he sold which were through BMT Micro or something. Still, everytime I've seen GOG sales compared to Steam sales for any given game (besides CDPR games), the GOG sales are a very tiny %. Wouldn't think they'd have a huge impact.
 
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Yeah I mentioned in another thread the data might be 10-30% off. Anyway this is good data for now until Steam implements it's own version of SteamSpy in the future.

Arstechnica themselves said the off can be a factor of two in the article itself, the chance increasing with games with very few achievements and being lower with games with many achievements.

It's also biased toward games that have achievements popping very early, before people stop playing them. Take Skyrim, the first achievement pops the moment you exist the starting dungeon which is like 20 minutes in, but I got 21 hours in Fallout 4 on Steam and 0 achievements unlocked…

It also ignores games that people buy and don't play (backlog/bundle games) and totally erroneous for games that added achievements post release (example Half-Life 2) and games that disable achievements if cheats are enabled.
 
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Yeah, Bethesda has really sold 36,000,000 copies on Steam. What's off for the indies is likely off for the big boys too. For instance, my first copy of Skyrim was on GFWL I think.
I'm sure that these totals are off because of the achievement thingie. If you mod something, and I do almost always, it typically disables the achievements.

It's just a good barometer for how the industry is doing on the whole. There is a TON of pc gaming going on at all times.
 
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I suspect people playing entirely offline might bork some of the numbers as well. Probably not as much for good old games as, say, steam, but still I can think of a few things that might cause significant skews. Actual sales though, those should come through cleaner.
 
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PoE2 only 200k LOL. So pathetic, but that is to be expected by that pathetic company.
#IamwithAvellone
 
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