An unexpected math equation may reveal the full player counts for PlayStation 4 games, conveniently organized on a new website with a growing library of titles. The new data development seems completely above board - the product of a clever combination of a publicized new PlayStation 4 feature with an equation to aggregate the potential playerbase of any player's My PS4 Life video.
Player counts are generally a suppressed metric for Sony PlayStation games, for good reason: they can provide telling insight into a given game’s lifetime sales. The recent My PS4 Life feature purports to give players their “greatest gaming moments,” adapting a combination of data visualizations, mined achievements, and trophy details from any PS4 player into a social-media-ready shareable video. It’s an impressive (and sometimes eye-opening) and scalable bonus feature celebrating 5 years of the platform - which might also be causing Sony to curse the skies right now.
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That’s where Redditor Gamstat's website comes in, which utilizes the information presented in My PS4 Life videos to triangulate some reasonable estimates on total players, which thereby provides a window into potential sales. It’s hard to imagine that this was what Sony had in mind when rolling out My PS4 Life, but leave it to the internet to make the most out of a slight peek into otherwise closely-guarded platform data.
This entire situation brings certain aspects of the PS4 platform in line with the Steam Store, which already presents percentile analytics of achievements in Steam games. Still, even the Steam store doesn’t publicize total player counts, which could open up undesirable scrutiny on poorly-performing games, especially those released by AAA publishers. For instance, Fallout 76’s PS4 numbers have already been shared on Gamstat, with an underwhelming total of 407,000 PS4 players. However, Gamstat also notes that these numbers, as with any games on the list, are probably capped for mid-November data, and Fallout 76 originally released on November 14. Visitors should also consider the metrics in comparison to any monthly PSN Plus games released to subscribers for free, as well as free installs/demos (like the first episode of Hitman).
All the same, it’s a peculiar inside look at some hidden figures, and the list of available metrics will arguably grow as time goes on and as more My PS4 Life data is obtained and processed. For now, if anyone ever wondered how Farming Simulator’s playerbase might compare with that of Overwatch, they can check the updating Gamstat website.
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Source: Gamstat