Steam charts don’t tell you how successful a game is
People use Steam charts websites to inform their discussions about which games are doing well, which games are failing, and which games are likely to get shut down. Unfortunately, they don't show what they think they do.
Over the last few years, internet commenters have started using sites like SteamDB.info and SteamCharts.com to find out how well games are doing. They use the numbers and rankings from the sites to inform their discussions about which games are doing well, which games are failing, and which games are likely to get shut down. Entire subreddits have formed around discussing the playercount for games and perversely cheering on the perceived impending demise of games – but Steam charts don’t tell you how successful a game is.
At the time of writing, Delta Force, an FPS game where you often can’t find matches on some of the extraction mode maps, is sitting at number 18, out of every game available on Steam. On the other hand, Spider-Man 2, which is currently the second best-selling game on Steam, is at number 121. Bongo Cat, a little app that creates an animated cat on your desktop, is number 5 while the excellent, critically acclaimed, and very successful 007 First Light is way down at number 459.
The problem is a misunderstanding of what these charts show. Both SteamDB and SteamCharts use a publicly available API from Steam that shows the number of concurrent users (CCU) on any specific app on Steam at a given time. They poll the API at different time intervals, giving slightly different rankings, but they’re using the same data point. In theory, the number of concurrent users is a pretty good measure of how popular a game is; it’s the number of people playing it right now after all. But it’s ignoring too many variables to be a useful source of information.
First of all, and I think the most widely understood issue, is that Steam charts only show the users on the Steam platform. Lots of games like 007 First Light are also available on console and, while some games might have the majority of their playerbase on PC, often there’s a lot more players on Playstation, Xbox and Switch. There’s also other platforms on PC. While Steam is inarguably the most popular, plenty of people play Call of Duty on Battle.net, or Escape from Tarkov on the Battlestate launcher, or Xbox games on the Xbox launcher to make use of Game Pass.