Though we’ve had our fun with SteamDB and other services that provide us with exact player counts in real time for Valve’s storefront, other platforms and stores never really added a similar feature of their own.
That is, until Sony recently started testing exactly that on the PlayStation 5, but instead of showing real-time figures, the platform will let you know which games were the most active in the past week, with total “weekly” players shown.
As seen in the video below by YouTuber Mystic, Sony is testing a PlayStation 5 feature that’ll let you know which games were the 10 most-played titles in the past week, presumably within your store’s region. The video shows games like GTA V getting 5.13 million players in the last week, or Minecraft having 4.9 million players hop into the game in the previous seven days.
Furthermore, the feature also shows trending games, indicating, through percentage points, how much of a “surge” a game saw within that same seven-day period. We can see Overwatch shown as having a “255 percent surge” or Company of Heroes getting a 249 percent jump in players. What the baseline for these percentages is unclear, but it could be taking the average of the week prior.
For the longest time, SteamDB, Steam Charts, and, of course, Steam itself were more or less the only platforms that showed us exactly how many people were playing a title simultaneously. Flops and hits are literally calculated based on those numbers, with players immediately going to them to decide whether they should treat a game as a success or not.
Now that we have console numbers to analyze, we can more closely deduce how well (or poorly) a game performed, since there are countless titles out there with more fans on consoles than PC.
