John Buckley, Publishing Director at Pocketpair and contact person for the Palworld project, is concerned: nowadays, the public is increasingly obsessed with judging a game's success and popularity based on Steam player data, which ultimately misleads many people.
Steam is not only the mainstream platform for PC gaming but also the only major platform that publicly provides real-time, detailed player data. As a result, Steam player counts—especially concurrent users—are often used as a benchmark and frequently weaponized against games. Whether it's Arc Raiders, Palworld, Peak, How to Fish, or Baldur's Gate 3, players always scrutinize these titles under the magnifying glass of SteamDB or Steam Charts.
For years, Buckley has been refuting the pessimistic claims labeling Palworld and countless other games as "dead." He believes that a decline in player numbers is normal and expected, and those figures described as "dismal" are actually quite impressive. In an interview at Gamescom 2026, he stated that the various discussions surrounding Steam data essentially reflect a cognitive bias among the general public.
"The data for Palworld has been completely misinterpreted by everyone," he said. "I still clearly remember when the concurrent player count dropped from 2.1 million to 500,000, the hottest posts online were saying, 'This is the game with the worst player drop-off in history.' But I thought, having 500,000 concurrent players is an astonishing number. People who say that probably have no concept of scale."
Although Palworld is most popular on PC, it is not exclusive to PC, which is one of the major problems with the "Steam-data-only" mindset. We can estimate trends through the game's Steam community, and Steam player data does have practical value and reference significance, but it cannot accurately judge the overall performance of a multi-platform game. Moreover, the factors influencing data fluctuations are very complex, far beyond just the quality of the game. Promotional events, update schedules, server downtime, time zone differences, and replayability all have a significant impact.
Similarly, Buckley analyzed the reference boundaries of Steam's concurrent user numbers.
"I'm not targeting SteamDB; I appreciate their team, but I think the level of data transparency has become too high in recent years," he said. "Now everyone loves to latch onto these data points. Now I finally understand why console manufacturers are unwilling to publish such data."
Coincidentally, Sony recently began testing a small PS5 feature that, to some extent, displays game activity levels, similar to the function of Steam Charts. However, even this small glimpse into the console data black box involves heavily obscured data.
"People look at this data, but I think everyone is misunderstanding it now," Buckley continued. "They think if there are 500,000 concurrent players in one hour and it drops to 400,000 the next, it means 100,000 people quit. That's not how it works, because people are logging in and out every second."
"I think we should start publishing Daily Active Users (DAU). I don't oppose releasing DAU data—the total number of people who actually played the game within a day. Because I think many people would be shocked by how large the gap between these two figures is. Think about it, a game with only 1,000 concurrent players might have a DAU of 20,000. The difference between these two numbers is huge."
Like Rebecca Ford, head of Warframe, Buckley is concerned that the current trend of "judging games by Steam data" is poisoning the environment for game discussion and evaluation.
"The public opinion issues caused by this data are hard to handle," Buckley added. "No one can escape it; no one is exempt. Poor Marathon and other games are currently being torn apart because of this. I'm sure in a few weeks, it'll be our turn. Someone will definitely say, 'Oh no, Palworld's concurrent players have dropped below 100,000.' It's only a matter of time."