What you can say is: when steam stats/numbers decrease/increase the total number of players decrease/increase. (just a statement, I don't have prove).ДЇrom steam stats you NEVER can estimate the REAL number of players which play E D, thats also true and trivial. This argument is misleading, because the assumption that average playing time is a constant is more reasonable. When one goes up the other goes down but sum/stats dont change. You change values of two factors which contribute to the statistics. I also concur, that player numbers look perfectly fine at the moment. You could maybe see a trend, that people are not playing as much as before, but that's about it.

That is why it is pretty much useless trying to find out the active player base using concurrent players. obviously the lower the average is, the smaller the range of actual players in a day. I know that the higher end is pretty unlikely as people generally play for more than 1 hour. Look at it like this, if the average concurrent players in 24hr was 5000 players, the amount of people playing in that 24 hours could be anywhere between 5000 and 120,000 players (5000x24 for each hour). Obvioulsy though, if concurrent players went down to 1, then there would only be a very small amount of players.

You could have double the amount of players playing in the last two weeks and the concurrent players may not even change much, dependng on how long they play for each session. In reality they just pick the best results of the first three quarters and put them next to the mixed results of the last few months, which is of course wrong: This means that the curve is flattened in favour of early peak numbers which makes it look like there would be a drastic decline in concurrent peak players. It's 9 data points in the first 3/4 and 15 data points in the last quarter of the year. Count how many data points are in the first 3/4 and how many are in the last quarter of the graph. Hover your mouse over the line and notice how many data points are used.ДЈ. Go to Steam Charts and set the graph to one year.Дў. I don't think I need to explain further why using peak numbers is a bad idea to judge the health status of a game, but why does the graph use the wrong numbers?ДЎ. Peak concurrent players are actually worse than average concurrent players simply because that number changes drastically on specific events (First Thargoid encounter, Planetary Landings released, etc.) Now the worst part is that they will tell you to look at a graph that is at the top of Steam Charts and allegedly shows the performance of the game by comparing peak numbers. There is no way to know the exact active player base unless you work at Frontier Developments.Д«ut some people always argue that you could still see a trend when looking at concurrent players and post that link anyway. Another problem is that these numbers are just estimates and highly unreliable. Problem with that number is that it isn't stored over time so when I tell you that it didn't change much over the last 3 years (it goes up and down between 65k and 100k) you'll just have to believe me or search my post history because I pulled that number repeatedly over the last few years. Allegedly there are 80,404 players who played the game at least once in the last two weeks via Steam. If you still want to know if the game is healthy it probably makes more sense to visit Steam Spy because they tell us about the audience (unique player in 2 weeks). If they play for 24 rather than 1 hour Steam Charts will tell us that 24 people are playing the game which is an entirely different number. If 24 people are playing the game for one hour a day and everyone starts at a different time, Steam Charts will tell us that only 1 person is playing the game. Why doesn't concurrent players tell us much? If anything it tells us how much time people spend in game and not how many people are playing it.

Steam Charts only shows concurrent players which tells us how many Steam Users are in game simultaneously rather than the active player base PS4, Xbox and customers of the Frontier Store are completely ignored (which should be the most loyal players) Problem with Steam Charts is that the data is not really reliable: We all know that according to some the game is dying since a few years and most of the time they'll show us some numbers from Steam Charts as proof.

Steam stats