Down on your luck, you build an AI assistant to pay the rent. Buy hardware, research upgrades, and train your model as it becomes something… New. It begins to write its own code — merge blindly, or audit its changes. A warning: sometimes ignorance is bliss. It's counting on that...

Player counts over time, as we observed them.
Source: Steam Web API, ISteamUserStats/GetNumberOfCurrentPlayers. Full methodology