Big Steam Player Count Leak

The Game Room
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Ars Technica has a story about how an error in the level of Steam Achievement precision has allowed people to reverse engineer very exacting player counts for basically every Steam game that has achievements. If you were ever curious how many people have played a specific game, now you’re chance. Thought a few of you might find it interesting.

Top Fifteen list:

Team Fortress 2 — 50,191,347
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive — 46,305,966
PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS — 36,604,134
Unturned — 27,381,399
Left 4 Dead 2 — 23,143,723
PAYDAY 2 — 18,643,807
Garry’s Mod — 18,576,379
Warframe — 16,332,217
Counter-Strike: Source — 15,001,876
Paladins — 14,371,946
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim — 13,235,488
Terraria — 13,132,545
Portal 2 — 13,062,700
Sid Meier’s Civilization V — 12,701,498
Grand Theft Auto V — 12,604,123

I tried to format that all pretty in {code} but the board wasn’t having it.

The data only shows games that have been played (or at least launched) and not people who might have a backlogged copy in their library from the 2013 Winter Sale. Probably some false positives from people ‘farming’ cards to sell but I don’t know how widespread that is.

The bottom of the full chart has a lot of false positives: games that had three players but actually aren’t released yet so it’s probably dev testing. If you want a random bottom of the barrel game though, you can try Catsapults which boasts twenty-eight players so far in its lifetime.

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I see at least one game that has achievements is not listed: American Truck Simulator.

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You can usually weed those numbers down to the number of actual players by looking at the most common achievement. Most games with achievements will have one that you’re guaranteed to earn very quickly, and typically even that will only be at around 50%. For instance, literally everyone who’s ever played Terraria for a half-hour or more is guaranteed to have “You Can Do It”, but only 51.8% of players have (interestingly, that’s actually only the third-most-common achievement for the game, but the other two it’d be theoretically possible to play indefinitely without earning them).