While we have referenced Steam concurrency numbers in some of our news reports, we often point out that it’s a facet of a greater look at how things are going for titles in our sphere, especially if we’re dealing with a title that’s on other platforms. Even with that asterisk, Pocketpair’s head of communications and publishing says that even then,Steam data isn’t telling the real story.
“People look at these, and I think that’s all really misunderstood now,” Buckley is quoted as saying. “I think people think 500,000 CCU one hour and 400,000 CCU one hour means 100,000 people stopped playing. That’s not what it means, because any second two could log on and two could log off.”
Buckley also recalled the perception of player falloff forPalworld, particularly the discourse that kicked off when the survivalbox’s concurrency dropped from 2.1M to 500K. “Some of the most viral posts at that time were, ‘This is the biggest game dropoff of all time.’ And I was like, half a million people playing a game at any one moment, it makes me want to be sick, how staggering that is,” he recounts.
Buckley additionally remarks how other factors like replayability, server maintenance, and even time zones can play a factor in concurrency data, and ultimately argues that a true measure of a game’s health is reflected in daily active users (DAUs) and how they can be wildly different from one another. It’s an argument that devs have brought up before, but sometimes it is good to be reminded that Steam headcounts aren’t always the final word.
