quantity Current Gamers on Steam Increasingly used as an indicator of a video game’s success or popularity, John Buckley, head of publishing at Palworld studio Pocketpair, said this approach has the potential to provide a very one-sided picture of the situation. In an interview during Gamescom 2026, Barkley said Criticize the way SteamDB and Steam Charts are sourced data They are interpreted by the community, especially when used to determine the presumed death of a game.
The frame is incomplete
Steam is the only major platform that exposes detailed, up-to-date concurrent user profiles, which is why the number of CCUs has become a widely cited metric. The problem, according to Buckley, is that the data is often viewed as representing the total number of people playing the game, but that’s not the case.
The most important example is Palworld itself. Buckley recalled a period when the number of simultaneous online users of the game rose from a peak of 2.1 million to about 500,000. Many online comments described the reduction as an unprecedented collapse, and according to the Pocketpair manager, the situation was anything but negative: “I remember that period 2.1 million concurrent users, then 500,000. Some of the most popular posts at the time said, “This is the biggest drop in the history of video games.” I thought: It gives me chills to have 500,000 people playing the game at any given time. It’s incredible. ”
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Another limitation involves cross-platform play. In fact, Palworld isn’t played exclusively on PC, so the Steam data is useful for identifying some trends, but doesn’t allow us to pinpoint How many users are playing in total?. Furthermore, fluctuations in current generation users can depend on many factors that are not necessarily related to game quality: sales, update frequency, server maintenance, time zones and the possibility of replaying content can have a significant impact.
Buckley said he doesn’t want to criticize SteamDB, which he admires, but he believes the continued public exposure of this data has changed the way video games are discussed. “Not to criticize SteamDB, because I like these people, but I think about how public these numbers have become over the past few years. People really, really like to bring them up. Now we understand why consoles don’t want to share them,” he noted.
According to Buckley, the main problem is confusion between concurrent users and active users throughout the day. “I think people will look at the data, it’s out there now a lot of confusion. I think they think 500,000 CCU one hour and 400,000 CCU the next means 100,000 people are no longer playing. But that doesn’t mean that, because at any time two people can be logged in, two people can be logged out,” he explained.
Therefore, Pocketpair managers also want to see data related to DAU (Daily Active Users). “I think we should start sharing DAUs. I’m not opposed to making them public: the actual number of people playing the game in a day. I think a lot of people will be surprised by the difference in those numbers. A game with 1,000 CCU might have 20,000 DAU”.
This difference is important because CCU records how many people are playing the game at the same time at any given time, while DAU measures how many different people are playing the game throughout the day. Therefore, using only the first data may result in Hasty conclusions about the health of the game.
Finally, Buckley worries that the obsession with contemporary user rankings will also have a negative impact on the video game debate. “It’s difficult to deal with these numbers. Everyone is affected now. No one is immune. Poor Marathon and other games are struggling because of this, and I’m sure it will be our turn in a few weeks. I’m sure people will say that Palworld has fallen below 100,000. So what? Below 100,000. It’s inevitable,” he concluded.
