Methodology
The short version of how we collect numbers, what we will not fake, and how often everything refreshes.
What we measure
howmanyplay shows live concurrent player counts on Steam, plus Twitch viewer counts as a popularity signal. Both come from the official public APIs run by the platforms themselves. No estimates, no scrapers.
Where the data comes from
| Source | What it gives us | How fresh |
|---|---|---|
| Steam Web API | Concurrent players for any title that uses Steam | 5 minute refresh for top games, slower for the long tail |
| Twitch Helix API | Live viewer count by game, summed across the top 300 streams | 5 to 15 minutes |
| RAWG and Steam appdetails | Cover art, developer, release year, genres | Refreshed weekly |
What we will not do
Every other tracker we have looked at quietly mixes real numbers with estimates. They scrape achievement timestamps to guess Xbox activity, or extrapolate sales data to invent a daily-active count. We refuse to do this. If a platform does not publish a live API, we say so on the page.
Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo do not expose concurrent-player APIs. Their games show up in our catalog with a clear NO PUBLIC API badge, not a fake number.
Fortnite, League of Legends, Valorant, Roblox, Genshin Impact, and a few other titles also lack public concurrent counts. They get the same treatment.
Refresh tiers
Polling every game every minute would burn through API rate limits for no benefit. Instead, the polling worker uses a tiered schedule based on each game’s current player count.
- 10K+ concurrent players: refreshed every 5 minutes
- 1K to 10K: every 15 minutes
- 100 to 1K: hourly
- Below 100: once a day
Tier assignments are recomputed after each refresh, so a game that suddenly spikes in popularity moves up tiers within the hour.
How peaks are computed
The 24-hour peak shown on every game page is the highest reading from the last 24 hours of polling data for that game. The all-time peak is the highest reading we have ever recorded for that game on our system. Sites with longer history will show larger numbers for older titles. We label everything with a timestamp so you can tell.
Honest gaps
A few things you should know.
- Our Steam catalog is comprehensive but not perfect. The initial discovery scan covered the top 1500 active titles. We add more on request and via curated seeding for marquee games.
- Concurrent player counts represent the moment we polled. They fluctuate between samples. Use the 24-hour chart to see the shape of activity.
- Twitch viewer counts include languages globally. Streams below rank 300 are not counted, but that tail is negligible for any game with real viewership.
Questions or corrections
Email info@howmanyplay.com if a number looks wrong, a game is missing, or you want to suggest a category change.