No way in h-ll does Steam represent 30 percent of the total STO playerbase, no possible way. Look at the math, as others have mentioned, the most players ever playing STO through Steam was roughly 7500, if that was 30 percent of STO's players then STO would only have 25000 total players, and the game would have been shut down by now because it could not possibly make any money with a playerbase that small, even if all 25k were paying subscribers and bought large amounts of things from the z-store daily it wouldn't even cover developer costs, to say nothing of all the other expenses the game has, like employee salary, physical server maintenance, etc.
Now someone else said that there was a claim that STO had 6 million players, also not possible. The most popular MMO ever, WOW, is currently over 10 million subscribers, was slumped to 6 million about 6 months ago. According to Gamestop's data the second most popular MMO has only about 500, 000 subscribers, and it aint STO. Make no mistake, I love this game, and I will continue playing and subscribing, but no way do we have millions subscribing.
The millions figure is derived from something Cryptic posted. But what Cryptic posted was 3.2M "Captains" not players. IE 3.2 Million characters in game.
No way in h-ll does Steam represent 30 percent of the total STO playerbase, no possible way. Look at the math, as others have mentioned, the most players ever playing STO through Steam was roughly 7500, if that was 30 percent of STO's players then STO would only have 25000 total players, and the game would have been shut down by now because it could not possibly make any money with a playerbase that small, even if all 25k were paying subscribers and bought large amounts of things from the z-store daily it wouldn't even cover developer costs, to say nothing of all the other expenses the game has, like employee salary, physical server maintenance, etc.
Now someone else said that there was a claim that STO had 6 million players, also not possible. The most popular MMO ever, WOW, is currently over 10 million subscribers, was slumped to 6 million about 6 months ago. According to Gamestop's data the second most popular MMO has only about 500, 000 subscribers, and it aint STO. Make no mistake, I love this game, and I will continue playing and subscribing, but no way do we have millions subscribing.
You are not understanding how the Steam Chart works. It doesn't measure how many players logged in for that day, but the maximum amount of players that logged in at a specific point in time. So 4,000 players might have been logged in at 4 PM, but 7,500 players were logged in at 8 PM. It might be possible that Steam consists of 30% of the total STO playerbase since we don't have the numbers or dev confirmation to back that up, but more than 7500 players log in through Steam. I wouldn't be surprised if 25,000 STO players use Steam to log in.
Years ago, I heard that to be successful, a MMO had to have around 100,000 players and I would not be surprised if STO was currently around that number. Of course, each MMO has different requirements to be successful since it is all based around the net profit and some MMOs have larger expenses than others, but the 100,000 player rule might be the average for MMOs. STO has nowhere near the expenses that WoW does so it doesn't need the amount of players that WoW does.
You need to ask Steam. It is their data. They listed it for anyone to see.
Steamcharts is actually not done by Steam/Valve itself. The data comes from Steam via their Steam Web API, but I don't know what kind of data the API exactly exposes or how that is collected. The site itself explains that it collects concurrent players on an hourly interval for each game.
Measuring the trends of games on Steam can give some great insights, and this website aims to be a valuable tool to do so. However, it's worth noting that an unpopular game does not necessarily indicate a bad game, and vice versa. If you have any questions or feedback please contact via Twitter, Trello, or find my personal details here.
This website is facilitated by a web frontend service and a data collector service that queries the Steam Web API. The collector queries the number of concurrent players on an hourly interval for every single game in the Steam catalog, and has been collecting data since July of 2012. The services are written in Go and the data is stored and managed with PostgreSQL.
Website and services are hosted by Digital Ocean in New York.
So the average is probably simply the average over all hours in that time frame (for example, for the monthly results), and the peak is the highest number over that day...
Aside from Steam's inability to distinguish between being inside the launcher and being in the game itself, the fact that it's based on concurrent players per hour is also likely to distort the impact of downtimes, as a measuring interval may not always perfectly coincide with the maintenance.
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You are not understanding how the Steam Chart works. It doesn't measure how many players logged in for that day, but the maximum amount of players that logged in at a specific point in time. So 4,000 players might have been logged in at 4 PM, but 7,500 players were logged in at 8 PM. It might be possible that Steam consists of 30% of the total STO playerbase since we don't have the numbers or dev confirmation to back that up, but more than 7500 players log in through Steam. I wouldn't be surprised if 25,000 STO players use Steam to log in.
Years ago, I heard that to be successful, a MMO had to have around 100,000 players and I would not be surprised if STO was currently around that number. Of course, each MMO has different requirements to be successful since it is all based around the net profit and some MMOs have larger expenses than others, but the 100,000 player rule might be the average for MMOs. STO has nowhere near the expenses that WoW does so it doesn't need the amount of players that WoW does.
Steamcharts is actually not done by Steam/Valve itself. The data comes from Steam via their Steam Web API, but I don't know what kind of data the API exactly exposes or how that is collected. The site itself explains that it collects concurrent players on an hourly interval for each game.
http://steamcharts.com/about
So the average is probably simply the average over all hours in that time frame (for example, for the monthly results), and the peak is the highest number over that day...
Aside from Steam's inability to distinguish between being inside the launcher and being in the game itself, the fact that it's based on concurrent players per hour is also likely to distort the impact of downtimes, as a measuring interval may not always perfectly coincide with the maintenance.