I love this game and I look at the stats constantly, but not to say the game is dead, but quite the contrary. I look at them as I want to see how our player base is. I want to see how it’s growing, how it’s falling, how the Steam sales affect and how it’s doing on Twitch.
The constant thing that immediately gets said is that stats are only “Concurrent Players”, or it doesn’t show PS players. Most of this is true we simply do not know the exact players that play on Playstation, but you can roughly estimate it.
There are a lot of stats out there… I have been keeping track of the players online on PC on a per hour basis. This chart shows the 24-hour Peak Players online.
The page this chart is on also states the number of players on Steam Players online right now (yes, no PS players sigh).
So, with that said, we know for a fact how many players play the game on PC. Some takeaways with this are how many of those are on just refueling beacons? How many are alt accounts? There are a lot of other variables we can throw out, but let’s just take the highest peak on July 3rd with 101 PC players online.
I would be pretty confident to say that we have an equal number of PS players online. Let’s be generous and add another 50 to that (101+50=151) and say 151 PS player and 101 PC players for a total of 252 total players.
As I stated, I can’t prove that we have 151 PS players any more than anyone can argue we only have 10. That said, I just want the community to grow, but I am a realist and I love numbers and watch them constantly.
Maybe I am misunderstanding the numbers, but if the Current Online Player count is 91 … wouldnt that mean there are 91 total players playing the game at that moment?
Yes. Concurrent means “at the same time”. It does not represent the total population of the game.
The reason this matters is because when you said this
You started talking about game population, which is usually measured with stats like daily active or monthly active users, not concurrent users. Without access to data of who is online at any given time, we can’t get population numbers, only concurrent player numbers.
If you compare the peak concurrent players on steam vs the peak concurrent players on the boundlesscrafting stats, which I believe are polled from world discovery data, you should get the approximate peak concurrent PS players.
In April of 2020, James said that the MAU (monthly active users) of Boundless was pretty constant at 3500MAU. And he said the engagement ratio (ratio of DAU to MAU) was over 40% (1400DAU). In those days, Boundless numbers had been fairly consistent around 100-120 average concurrent players for the past few months.
Now, Boundless averages pretty close to half those numbers for average concurrent players. If we assume that the average hours played per day per player is roughly the same and the engagement ratio is still roughly the same, then that works out to 700 active players daily and 1750 active players monthly.
Maybe the engagement ratio is down if more people are just logging in to fuel portals and beacons once every week or two. Maybe it’s only the more hardcore players left who play more hours in a day. It’s a rough calculation for sure, but I’d think that’s still fairly accurate.
I guess we’ll never know unless James spits out some numbers. I don’t really care honestly what the exact numbers are (even though they would be nice to know) I can just wander worlds and realize there aren’t that many players.
If this is true the concurrent number is roughly around this now… give or take a handful. So, would that mean we still have 1400 Daily Active Users?
It means that there are currently 61 players logged into the game from Steam at that exact time. Players log out and other players log in over the course of the day. It’s not the same 61 players always logged in 24 hours a day. That’s why the amount of daily active users is much higher.
I think that the data is technically available, but that nobody is gathering it. I don’t know if it’s in the API nobody active has access to or if it’s in the private API that can be accessed by pretending to be the game client that nobody active has the knowledge of how to use, but in any case the effect is the same - we can only guess.
Probably best that we don’t know those numbers then I suppose.
Granted, an answer to the question about how many players are playing the game would be nice. I say this because there are some really large streamers that just look at the same charts I posted and base a purchase and/or a game tryout on those numbers. This being at least 5 streamers I watch with over 20k average viewers.
Why not just ask devs to tell us…
They should be able to check DAU’s based on session logins and Gleamclub active users which would cover both pc and ps players right? So we can finally know the numbers lol
And if we say that half are PC and half PS then we had 875 monthly PC players. If only half bought Gleam Club then 438 (Rounding up) $2190 per month + other steam sales would have been the gross revenue before taxes and Steams cut going to SE to pay for the game servers. And we know they were not making enough to pay for the servers. So based on a ton of assumptions. if this is doubled with the PS players and if the number to pay for the servers is below $4000 per month, there might actually be enough revenue to keep the servers running since they have the PS and the Steam revenue. This also does not include any revenue from Sovereigns, but my conversations with James indicated this was not set up as a profit center so it may not be a substantial amount of money (but any revenue is good revenue).
I am not saying we only have 250 players, because who really knows.
I play a lot! I also visit a lot of planets running around scanning planets. One would think that during my travels I would run across a lot more unique people if there were over 700 unique players in the game every day. At one point I was even making notes about all the people I saw as I was trying to prove to myself that we had more than the “Concurrent” player count shown on Steam.
You would also think I would at least run into 50 unique players a day or even a week, heck even a month if I am porting/warping to every planet I can every week. From an observation standpoint, I understand people are on sovereigns, people are on at different times, some people are only on to refuel beacons, and some people run multiple accounts, etc. etc. but when I am visiting nearly every single planet, you would at least think I’d see or run into more people. I actively search for people during my scans too. If I port/warp to a planet I look for people on my compass and I also look for cities and visit them to see if I can see anyone and to just check out builds.
Anyways, I just want to understand the numbers, understand what the current game limitations are when it comes to players (if there is one) and how I can help.
so technically I’m everyone 
