Growing infatuation with Steam player numbers as a means to gauge a game's success or popularity has ultimately misled a lot of people, worries Palworld liaison and Pocketpair publishing lead John Buckley.

Because Steam is both the dominant platform for PC gaming and the only major platform that shares live, granular player data, Steam player counts, particularly concurrent users, are regularly used as a measuring stick, or just as often, a bludgeon. It could be Arc Raiders, Palworld, Peak, How to Fish, or Baldur's Gate 3; gamers will put you under the SteamDB or Steam Charts microscope.

Buckley's regularly pushed back on the "dead game" doomsaying chucked at Palworld and countless other games over the years, arguing that player falloff is normal and expected, and that numbers often described as dire are in fact quite healthy. In an interview at Gamescom 2026, he describes the Steam number chatter as part of a larger misunderstanding.

"The numbers are so distorted with Palworld," he says. "I so vividly remember the 2.1 million concurrent to half a million concurrent [period]. Some of the most viral posts at that time were, 'This is the biggest game dropoff of all time.' And I was like, half a million people playing a game at any one moment, it makes me want to be sick, how staggering that is."

Though Palworld was biggest on PC, it wasn't only on PC, and this is one problem with Steam math. We can estimate trends based on a game's Steam community, and Steam player numbers do have genuine value and applications, but we can't get a reliable picture of a multiplatform release.

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