Sony’s new weekly player tracker is giving us some fascinating insight into the PS5 playerbase – and it seems to have taken fans by surprise.
Currently in beta, the new Welcome Hub widget surfaces the top ten most played games in each country, complete with total weekly player numbers.
It’s similar to the data we’ve been getting from Steam, although that shows concurrent players, which is the total number of players logged into a particular title at any given moment. Here we’re seeing the total number of unique players who started a game over the past seven days.
As the feature is still currently in beta, this is the data we have for the US courtesy of original source Mystic so far:
Fortnite: 14.6m
GTA 5: 5.13m
Minecraft: 4.97m
Call of Duty: 4.95m
Apex Legends: 1.72m
Marvel Rivals: 1.58m
Battlefield 6: 1.51m
ARC Raiders: 972k
There are a few notable exceptions here that leap out to us: Roblox will almost certainly be one of the top ten games, and we’d probably expect a sports title – like NBA 2K – to feature somewhere.
But for us, there are no real surprises here. These are undoubtedly the biggest games on PlayStation right now, and we doubt the top ten changes much from week-to-week to be honest.
Some fans, however, seem stunned by the presence of eternal games like GTA 5 and Minecraft – both over ten years old at this point.
Everything on this list is a live service game; they’re not all free-to-play, but they do benefit from perpetual update cycles with new content that keeps them fresh for players. They’re likely all primarily powered by microtransactions, too.
We know microtransactions have become the biggest contributor to PlayStation’s bottom line for several years now, so again there should be no real surprises here. But we’d reiterate that enthusiasts seem stunned by this revelation.
Here’s the cold harsh reality: this is why Sony is chasing live service games, and this is why it’s not going to give up. The most popular games on its platform, by an absolute country mile, are the ones you can play forever.
You may not like the idea of that, but this is the data the platform holder’s seeing every single day.
Obviously we love those one-and-done single player games here at Push Square, and they clearly still have a very important place in PlayStation’s portfolio, but it’s hard to argue with facts – they’re not what people are playing, certainly not over a long period of time.
Now it’s clear Sony has completely bungled its live service approach, frustrating its fanbase, killing studios unnecessarily, and wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on games that were never going to overcome any on this list.
But when you see this data and the sheer number of players engaging with these games, how can you possibly argue against the general idea?
[source youtube.com, via News: PS5 Will Reveal the Most Played Games with Steam-Like Player Numbers]
See Also
As the Editor of Push Square, Sammy has over 15 years of experience analysing the world of PlayStation, from PS3 through PS5 and everything in between. He’s an expert on PS Studios and industry matters, as well as sports games and simulators. He also enjoys RPGs when he has the time to dedicate to them, and is a bit of a gacha whale.