It appears that Valve has leaked the total number of players for almost every game that is currently available on Steam right now. A recently discovered hole in Valve’s API allowed gamers to generate extremely precise and publicly accessible data for the total number of players for Steam games that featured Achievements.
As ArsTechnica pointed out, the following table was created thanks to the accuracy of Steam’s Achievement percentages.
“The new data derivation method, as ably explained in a Medium post from The End Is Nigh developer Tyler Glaiel, centers on the percentage of players who have accomplished developer-defined Achievements associated with many games on the service. On the Steam web site, that data appears rounded to two decimal places. In the Steam API, however, the Achievement percentages were, until recently, provided to an extremely precise 16 decimal places.
This added precision means that many Achievement percentages can only be factored into specific whole numbers. (This is useful since each game’s player count must be a whole number.) With multiple Achievements to check against, it’s possible to find a common denominator that works for all the percentages with high reliability. This process allows for extremely accurate reverse engineering of the denominator representing the total player base for an Achievement percentage.”
In July 4, Valve updated its Steam API to provide much less precision in its Achievement percentages. As such, the following table is only relevant for these past/next few days. Moreover, Valve has already expressed its desire to provide a more accurate way for users and developers to get – perhaps sales and player count – data out of Steam.
So without further ado, here are the top 10 games with the highest amount of players on Steam right now.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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