Thanks to the "Steam Community Hub" and services like SteamDB, PC gamers can easily find out about online metrics: see the current number of players, daily and record peak online, and track the dynamics of the game's audience changes.
Sometimes, gamers interpret declining metrics as "the game is dying," which some developers consider to be a mistaken approach.
Recently, manager Jon "Bucky" Buckley, head of communications and publishing at Pocket Pair, recalled how Palworld's online metrics were discussed online. At the launch of early access, the peak online exceeded 2 million players, but over time, the numbers began to decrease:
The numbers for Palworld are so distorted. I remember very well the period from 2.1 million concurrent players to half a million. Some of the most viral posts then were like: "This is the biggest online drop in history." And I thought: half a million people playing one game at any given time — it makes me sick how impressive that is. I don't want to bash SteamDB, because I like those guys, but I think about how public these numbers have become in recent years: people really love to pull out such data. Now we understand why console creators don't want to share them.
Bucky believes that people misinterpret online metrics. Many think that if the peak online is 500 thousand in one hour, and 400 thousand in the next, it means that 100 thousand people have stopped playing:
That's not actually the case, because at any given second, two can join and two can leave. I think we need to start sharing DAU [daily active users]. I wouldn't mind making DAU public — showing the number of real people who logged into the game in one day. I think many will be shocked at how different these numbers are. You know, a game with a peak online of a thousand players can have 20 thousand users log in per day.
The manager recalled the example of Marathon. At launch on Steam, the game's peak online was over 88 thousand, recently it has been within 4 thousand:
Everyone can see [the online numbers] and no one is safe anymore. Poor Marathon and the developers who are now being slandered [due to low online numbers]. And I'm sure our turn will come in a few weeks. I'm sure people will say something like: "Palworld's online has dropped below 100 thousand."