Gaiff
SBI’s Resident Gaslighter
This metric has been used a lot over the past few months (years?) to mainly push agendas over whether a release has been successful or not. While it is a good sample and a strong data point, it remains just that: a single data point. It tells us nothing about the total amount of copies sold, nor how well a game did on consoles.
Now, I'm not saying it never proves anything. In extreme cases, it can almost without a doubt tell us some things. For instance, Black Myth Wukong peaked at an eye-watering 2.1M concurrent users. That's a smash it. There's no way around that one. Even if the console sales in comparison were modest (they were), the PC version alone sold so damn well that it was enough to carry the game on its own.
The opposite is also true. Concord peaking at ~700 concurrent users was a bomb of epic proportions. PlayStation could have had 10x as many users at the same time, and it still would have been a colossal flop.
However, in most cases, it's a lot more nuanced than that. Take the example of Silent Hill 2 that peaked at a pedestrian 21,700 concurrent users on Steam. You'd think it's a flop, but then it was revealed 78% of the copies sold during launch week in Europe were on PlayStation, making that data point a decent sample, but far from truth-telling, especially since the game wound up selling 2 million copies in just over 3 months. Or how about Veilguard that peaked at 93K concurrent users, significantly above Assassin's Creed Shadows, but the former only presumably reached 1.5M in around 2 months, whereas the latter reached 2 million players in 3 days. I'm using the same metric, engagement. Those aren't sales. I'm not sure if Shadows is selling more than Veilguard (I bet it is), but this is just to demonstrate that Steam CCUs aren't the be-all and end-all of a game's success. In Shadow's case, a substantial amount is likely playing the game on Ubisoft Connect as well, further reducing Steam's overall importance. PlayStation also isn't some insignificant platform. It's frequently the most popular system for a given game and Steam concurrent users tell us nothing about that.
tl;dr: Steam CCUs are a useful sample and data point, but they must be put within their proper context and consoles also cannot be ignored because of it.
Now, I'm not saying it never proves anything. In extreme cases, it can almost without a doubt tell us some things. For instance, Black Myth Wukong peaked at an eye-watering 2.1M concurrent users. That's a smash it. There's no way around that one. Even if the console sales in comparison were modest (they were), the PC version alone sold so damn well that it was enough to carry the game on its own.
The opposite is also true. Concord peaking at ~700 concurrent users was a bomb of epic proportions. PlayStation could have had 10x as many users at the same time, and it still would have been a colossal flop.
However, in most cases, it's a lot more nuanced than that. Take the example of Silent Hill 2 that peaked at a pedestrian 21,700 concurrent users on Steam. You'd think it's a flop, but then it was revealed 78% of the copies sold during launch week in Europe were on PlayStation, making that data point a decent sample, but far from truth-telling, especially since the game wound up selling 2 million copies in just over 3 months. Or how about Veilguard that peaked at 93K concurrent users, significantly above Assassin's Creed Shadows, but the former only presumably reached 1.5M in around 2 months, whereas the latter reached 2 million players in 3 days. I'm using the same metric, engagement. Those aren't sales. I'm not sure if Shadows is selling more than Veilguard (I bet it is), but this is just to demonstrate that Steam CCUs aren't the be-all and end-all of a game's success. In Shadow's case, a substantial amount is likely playing the game on Ubisoft Connect as well, further reducing Steam's overall importance. PlayStation also isn't some insignificant platform. It's frequently the most popular system for a given game and Steam concurrent users tell us nothing about that.
tl;dr: Steam CCUs are a useful sample and data point, but they must be put within their proper context and consoles also cannot be ignored because of it.
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