A recent oopsie-do by Valve gives us the total player count for thousands of Steam games.
[7/8/2018] UPDATE: We have made slight corrections to better clarify how these estimates were derived and the various factors effecting their accuracy.
Thanks to a recent data leak within the Steam Achievements API, thousands of games available on the Steam library have had information regarding their total player counts made available to the public.
The leak, now plugged by Valve, was the result of a new form of data research originating from barter.vg. By taking a look at the percentage of a games completed achievements and determining how many players it would take to reach those figures, these resourceful enthusiasts were able to calculate the player count of thousands of games.
How precise are these derived estimates exactly? Steam provides this information on their website rounded to two decimal points. This new data, on the other hand, provides numbers accurate to an astounding 16 decimal points. Valve has since addressed the issue and altered the Steam API to provide a less accurate reading, but not before the comprehensive list of data made its way across this internet.
It’s a unique opportunity to learn just how popular some of Steam’s top VR games truly are. Below are the player counts for these various games, curated by Reddit user Loumiskme.
It’s important to note, however, that this leak includes Steam games which provide multiple Steam Achievements. This means that VR games still in early access are excluded from this list. Games which include limited or unique achievement systems may also be absent or have skewed numbers:
- Rec Room – 316 K
- Job Simulator – 200 K
- Space Pirate Trainer – 179 K
- Arizona sunshine – 168 K
- SUPERHOT VR – 158 K
- Fallout 4 VR – 133 K
- Skyrim VR – 99 K
- The Gallery – Episode 1 – 92 K
- Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality – 84 K
- Fruit Ninja VR – 75 K
- The Brookhaven Experiment – 74 K
- Holopoint – 60 K
- Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope – 53 K
- Sairento – 43 K
- I expect you to die – 41 K
- Out of Ammo – 35 K
- DOOM VFR – 34 K
- Duck Season – 30 K
- Talos Principle VR – 26 K
- Cosmic Trip – 17 K
- LA Noire VR – 17 K
- Sprint Vector – 16 K
- Eagle Flight – 13 K
- Ultrawings – 12 K
- Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades – 9.7 K
- The Gallery – Episode 2 – 7.8 K
- Ark Park – 4.7 K
- Moss – 4.6 K
- Apex Construct – 2.7 K
For more information on how these numbers were generated, The End Is Nigh developer, Tyler Glaiel, posted an excellent explanation on Medium where he goes into the details of this new data research methodology.
Image Credit: SteamVR / Rec Room
