Concurrent Board · 3 tools · 2 reads · 1 source

This board counts
who is online.
Nothing else.

Every figure on these pages is a concurrent player count — how many people were inside a game at the moment it was read. Not copies sold, not review scores, not money. It is the one number Valve publishes for free, it misbehaves in ways worth knowing about, and the pages below take it seriously enough to say where it stops being useful.

/pick Run this one What To Play Tonight Four questions, and not one of them is “pick a genre.” How long you actually get in one sitting, whether anyone is on the other end of it, what would make tonight a good night, and what you want left when you close it — then one game named off the live board, with the reason it fits and its player count, price and studio beside it. in4 questions time1 min outone game, named authnone required Run it

The two tables

pathnamein · time · out
  1. /charts The Full Hundred The hundred most-played games on Steam, with this week’s peak and the count right now in the same row. Sort by either and the order changes — a game can be enormous on Sunday night and ordinary on Tuesday morning, and the two columns disagree about which one it is. innothing required time3 min out100 rows, 7 columns
  2. /rank The Crooked Ladder The places on that list are evenly spaced. The games behind them are not. Type any number of players and it tells you where that lands, then what the next rung up would cost you — which at the top is a city and at the bottom is a schoolroom. inone number time2 min outits place, and one rung’s cost
ad slot

Two things the board will not tell you

Nobody Paid To Get In A chart of people online is a chart of who was let in. Four separate reasons the measurement itself favours free games, the three things a game with no price can sell you instead — plus the fourth arrangement that hides two of them behind a chance — and why the average spend is the wrong number to quote. Read it What Kind Of Game Is It Three fields on a store page claim to answer that, and three different people write them. Which is which, why the tag list is a popularity contest rather than a description, six words that do not mean what the field means, and why no table on this site prints a genre column. Read it

What one number is doing here

Concurrent is a headcount, not a scoreboard.

It says how many people were in a game at one instant. It says nothing about whether they were enjoying it, whether they paid for it, or whether it is any good. A game with a tenth of the players can easily have taken ten times the money, and no page here will pretend otherwise.

Free games start several lengths ahead.

Nothing stands between wanting to play and playing, so the top of any concurrent chart skews hard toward games with no price on them. That is a property of the measurement, not a verdict on the games, and it is worth reading before you treat the order as a ranking of quality.

Every figure carries the hour it was read.

Live counts swing by the time of day and the day of the week, so each page that shows one prints the timestamp it was pulled at, right at the top. If a number here disagrees with one you saw this morning, that stamp is the first thing to check — the two are probably both right.

Nothing here reads your library.

There is no login, no Steam connection, and no record of what you answered — the four questions are scored in your browser and gone when the tab closes. The privacy page lists the handful of things that are recorded.