The craze for public data services like SteamDB and the obsession with online peaks has distorted the actual view of video game success, turning healthy audience metrics into tools for unfounded criticism.
In an interview at Gamescom 2026, Pocketpair head John Buckley shared his painful experience with Palworld. According to him, the number of concurrent users (CCU) suddenly dropped from an incredible 2.1 million to 500,000, which was accompanied by a wave of toxic rhetoric about the “death” of the project, although such a number is still a remarkable result for the industry.
Buckley emphasized that the public Steam rankings do not reflect the true situation of multi-platform releases and are often misunderstood by the public: a drop of 100,000 people in conditional online activities in an hour does not mean that players have collectively abandoned the project.
As an alternative, experts recommend making the daily active audience (DAU) metric public, which can clearly show the huge difference between the number of people online at one time and the actual number of people online every day.
