It looks as if Sony has inadvertently given the internet a pretty surefire way to work out exactly how many people are playing almost every PS4 title.
The company recently shared a cool little venture called My PS4 Life, which – similar to the Spotify Year In Review – dives into your own personal data and tells you what games you’ve been playing the most.
It’s a really cool little feature that can tell you exactly how much of your life you’ve wasted on Bloodborne (too much, in my case), but the real kicker is that people have used the information in My PS4 Life to work out the total number of players per game.
As pointed out by Gamstat on Reddit:
But what is also important, in every video they disclose the exact number of players who received some trophy. Combined with the % of people who obtained the trophy (this data is available for every game on the PlayStation website), we can estimate the total number of players in this game. Here, 33,764 players earned the “Photo Bomber” trophy in Fallout 76. And on playstation.com it’s revealed that 8,3% of all players got this trophy. Simple math: the total number of people who have played Fallout 76 on PS4 = 33,764 * 100% / 8,3% = 406,795. The same trick can be done with every PlayStation 4 game – you just need a video where it’s someone’s rarest trophy. But better not too rare – 0.1% share doesn’t provide a good estimate.
If you can’t be bothered to do the math yourself of course, Gamstat has provided a handy link showing estimated player totals for 92 PS4 games, which you can find right here.
Naughty Dog It might not the most perfect system to calculate the exact numbers, given that it’s been pointed out that this method doesn’t account for players without an internet connection, but it should be provide a fairly close estimate.
While it also looks like a lot of newer games haven’t been properly accounted for just yet, the list still makes for interesting reading. Overwatch, for example, predictably boasts over 10 million, while The Last of Us Remastered has had nearly 16 million players up in it since release.
We can also see that Call of Duty WWII boasts nearly twice as many players as Ghosts, which is really quite impressive, while Black Ops 4 currently has a little over 9 million.
Activision Dive in for yourself and take a look, just remember that these are estimates and are by no means official numbers in any way.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.