Methodology

Every number on this site comes from a named source, has a written definition, and shows when it was measured. This page explains how we collect data; each metric below has its own page with its caveats.

How we collect

  • Source. The official Steam Web API, within Valve’s terms of use and its limit of 100,000 calls a day. We do not scrape Steam’s store pages.
  • Earlier history. Our own polls start in October 2026. For our most played games, monthly averages and peaks before then come from a licensed historical archive, used with permission. They are shown in their own chart, apart from our measurements, and are estimates accurate to within about 0.3%.
  • Player counts. Steam reports how many people are in a game at the moment we ask. We ask about the busiest 250 games every 15 minutes, the next few thousand every six hours, others daily, and quiet games about once a month. Each game page says how often it is polled.
  • Catalogue and store details. We check Steam’s catalogue hourly for new and changed games, and fetch release dates, developers and tags for each game weekly or when it changes.
  • Times. Everything is stored in UTC. Times of day are shown in your own timezone; daily and monthly figures are UTC days and months.