How we count players

A count is the number of people playing a game on Steam at the moment Steam answers: players in game, in Valve's own words. It is not the number of owners, sales, wishlists or players on consoles and other PC stores, and Steam publishes no count for those.

Steam serves each game's count from a cache that can be up to 15 minutes old, so a reading stands for that moment give or take a few minutes.

Steam's chart of its 100 most played games refreshes about every 5 minutes, and we store every one. Every other game is read on its own, at a pace set by how many people play it: every hour for the next 1,200 games, every 6 hours for up to 5,000 more, once a day for any game with a player in the last 14 days, and once a week for the rest. A game we have never seen with a player is read every 28 days until it has one.

For now we read the games that have been in Steam's top 100 or on its daily most played list since we began tracking; more of Steam's catalogue follows.

The pace is a budget, not a choice of taste. Valve's terms allow 100,000 calls to the Steam Web API a day, and we hold ourselves to at most 90,000, with room left for retries. Each game page says how often its game is read.

The home page and the page of the most played games follow Steam's chart within about 15 minutes. The other lists are rebuilt every hour.

A peak is the highest reading we took. A game read every hour can have peaked between two readings, so its peak can be lower than one taken every 5 minutes. A record, or the highest count on a page, counts only from the day we began tracking, which every such page names; Steam keeps no history of player counts, so we never claim one from before that day.

A day's average is the mean of its hourly means, so the 12 chart readings of a busy hour weigh no more than one reading in a quiet one. Days are UTC days. A day is final once its last readings are in, at 01:05 UTC the next day; until then pages call it the day so far.

A game's days and months start at the first full UTC day we tracked, so no partial day is shown as a day, and its month table appears once a month is complete.

A 7-day average needs readings on at least 4 of its 7 days, and its change against the week before needs that in both weeks. A 30-day average needs at least 15 days. Until a game has a change week against week, its page compares the last 24 hours with the 24 hours before, when we hold a reading in at least 18 of the hours of each. Week against week starts once we hold 14 days of a game's readings. We give the change as a number, never as a verdict on the game.

Trending ranks games averaging at least 1,000 players in game by that change, week against week. While fewer than two games have one, it compares the last 24 hours with the 24 before, or, for a database holding less than 48 hours, the last 12, 6 or 3 hours with as many before, for games with a reading in at least 75 percent of the hours of each window.

A gap in our readings stays a gap: charts leave it empty and averages leave it out. We never fill in a missing reading.

A launch starts at the release date the Steam store gives, for games released from 2 October 2026. A new game without a release date counts from our first reading with players. Its first 24 hours, its first 7 days and its 30th day are counted from that moment, not from midnight, and each peak shows about an hour after its window ends.

The daily most played pages keep Steam's own list (GetMostPlayedGames) as Valve publishes it: Valve's rank, its daily peak and its rank a week before. The list is Valve's measure, not ours, and is not always ordered by the peak. Steam shows only the newest day; we keep every day we read.

A game has a page of its own when it is in Steam's top 100, was ever on Steam's daily most played list, has launched while we track, or has readings on at least 3 days at a pace of every 6 hours or tighter with a daily peak of at least 50 players once. Every game read with players in the last 14 days is on the A to Z list, 200 games a page.

A page stays once it exists. If we have no reading of a game for 14 days, its page says since when no players were seen. A page whose game has had no reading for 90 days, and fewer than 30 days with a reading in all, is removed.

Game names come from Wikidata (CC0) where it has one, else from the Steam store, else from Steam's own list of games. A game without a name gets no page until a name is known.

Give the number with its time and its source, as each game page's citation line does, for example: "Counter-Strike 2: 1,234,567 players in game on Steam at 14:05 UTC on 4 October 2026. Source: gamesactivity.com, from the Steam Web API." Link the page you took it from.

• 6 October 2026 Days and months start at the first full UTC day we tracked, and the month table appears once a month is complete.
• 5 October 2026 First version.