Palworld Publisher Says Players Misinterpret Steam Player Counts

People who love tracking metrics do not entirely understand how they actually work.

Thanks to the Steam Community Hub and services like SteamDB, PC gamers can easily check online metrics to see current player counts, daily and peak player records, and track audience trends over time.

Gamers sometimes interpret declining numbers as a sign that a game is dying, which some developers consider to be a flawed approach.

John “Bucky” Buckley, communications and publishing manager at Pocket Pair, recently recalled how online metrics for Palworld were discussed online. During early access launch, peak concurrent players exceeded 2 million, but those figures eventually decreased over time:

The Palworld numbers are so skewed. I remember very well the period going from 2.1 million concurrent players down to half a million. Some of the most viral posts back then were along the lines of: “This is the biggest drop in concurrent players in history.” And I was thinking: half a million people playing a single game at any given moment—it makes me feel sick how impressive that is. I don’t want to bash SteamDB because I like those guys, but I think about how public these numbers have become in recent years: people really love pulling out this data. Now we understand why console makers don’t want to share them.

Bucky believes people misinterpret concurrent player metrics. Many think that if the peak player count is 500,000 one hour and 400,000 the next, it means 100,000 people stopped playing:

That is actually not true, because at any given second two people can log in and two people can log out. I think we need to start sharing DAU [daily active users]. I wouldn’t mind making DAU public—showing the number of real people who logged into the game in a single day. I think many people will be shocked by how different these numbers are. You know, a game with a peak concurrent player count of a thousand might have 20,000 users log in over the course of a day.

The manager recalled the example of Marathon. At launch on Steam, the game’s peak player count was above 88,000, and recently it has hovered around 4,000:

Everyone can see [the concurrent player counts] and nobody is safe anymore. Poor Marathon and the developers who are getting heavily criticized right now [due to low player numbers]. And I am sure our turn will come in a few weeks. I am sure people will say something like: “Palworld dropped below 100,000 concurrent players.”

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