A successful video game is a difficult thing to measure when you're outside the video game industry looking in. The video game industry has always had a transparency problem, and the inner workings of the business of video games have only become more opaque as it's continued to grow. You can't go look up what it took to make a video game in the same way you can go look up what it took to make last year's blockbuster film.

Open Google and do a cursory search on how much it cost to make Dune: Part Two. You'll easily find that it took $190 million to produce. Do the same with Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, and you'll find articles talking about how much Warner Bros. lost in revenue, but not exactly the production costs.

We seem to only ever find out how much a video game costs to make if it's accidentally unveiled through court documents or malicious hacks, or in the rare occasion that information is divulged freely. As consumers, we don't have a lot of tools to really determine what was successful or not, or what metrics matter in regard to talking about a video game's success.

We do have SteamDB, a resource that can tell you a number of things, but chiefly it tells you what the most played games are on Steam, and the metric that's talked about quite a bit now, which spawned this whole article, concurrent player numbers. Which, for the unitiated, is the number of players in real time playing a game at any given moment on Steam. I'm not saying it's a completely unhelpful metric to look at. Of course, there's value in knowing how many players are actively engaged in a specific game at any time.

But it is absolutely not the key metric so many people seem to think it is. You'd be wrong to use it as your prime example of why one game is failing and another is a success, commercially or critically, because the bottom line is that concurrent player numbers on Steam do not give you the whole picture.

Steam is just one part of the picture

People play video games on more than just PCs, ya know.

This seems like an obvious point, but if it was obvious, then this whole article wouldn't need to exist. Steam is an avenue through which people play their games, and it only accounts for PC players. Steam is definitely the most popular, and it's definitely what PC players use more than Epic Game Store, or GOG, or any other launcher that you might use to play your games on PC, but it's not the only one.

And that's before getting into the fact that there are millions of people who play their games on consoles. Whether it's a PlayStation, Xbox, or Nintendo device, those player counts are not included in Steam charts. Again, it's an obvious point, because it's right in the name that SteamDB only accounts for Steam. I also want to be clear, I don't think that anyone throwing Steam concurrent numbers around online as a way of showing a game is failing or succeeding is forgetting the fact that consoles aren't included in those numbers.

The issue is that when you do that, you're placing far more weight on those numbers than what's actually there. It might feel like it is sometimes, but Steam is not the be-all-end-all avenue through which people play video games. If you only play your games on a PC, and you only use Steam, the scale of Steam makes it easy to feel like there's nothing outside that bubble, or that what is outside the bubble doesn't hold as much value.

But your feelings don't make it right or true that Steam concurrents are this accurate insight, telling you what games are successful and therefore maybe even good, and what games are unsuccessful and potentially bad.

It's even more useless to look at concurrent player numbers for single-player games

And they're only useful for multiplayer games to a point.

Another huge part of what inspired this article was the fact that I kept seeing people bring up concurrent player numbers when talking about single-player games. Why anyone would think that concurrent player numbers are a metric that matters for single-player games at all is beyond me. That 1,000 people are playing a single-player game one day and only 50 the next doesn't mean the game suddenly died. It doesn't mean the opposite if those numbers are swapped.

If it tells you anything, it tells you more about how some people structure their days as to when they want to play a game. Or maybe 1,000 people jumped on one day because a new DLC was released that same day, or a new update was pushed. The bottom line is that when it comes to single-player games, the number of copies sold is what matters, not necessarily the number of people playing at any given time.

There are insights developers can draw from how long people spend with a game, or how many reached the credits if it's a story-driven game, but the day-to-day concurrent player counts, and just concurrent player numbers overall, are not in any way a sign that a single-player game is doing well or poorly. Even when it comes to launch day numbers. Sure, it makes for a good-looking headline to point out that a game had so many players jump in at launch, but launch-day sales and player counts don't define the arc of a game's reception critically or commercially.

Of course, the story is a little different when you're looking at multiplayer games. Concurrent player counts over a longer period of time and the day-to-day fluctuations within that can be an indicator of the health of that game's community. But even then, there are still more factors at play when you're trying to talk about whether a game is a commercial and/or critical success.

There are other ways to follow a game's trajectory

You just need to know where to look.

As I said at the top, the video game industry has a transparency problem, but that doesn't mean it's completely impenetrable. There are resources you can access just as an outsider looking in if you want to be as in-the-know as possible about a particular game's commercial success. Trade publications like GamesIndustry.biz will report sales numbers for UK and EU sales information they get from Newzoo and GfK. People in the US can turn to Circana's video game executive director and industry analyst Mat Piscatella, who publishes sales numbers for US sales each month. Famitsu publishes sales numbers for the video game industry in Japan, and Niko Partners research director Daniel Ahmad will often publish data on the industry in China and other parts of Asia and MENA.

These sources account for more than just what's being played on Steam, and some of them aren't just posting sales, but player engagement numbers as well. Which means you're getting a more detailed look at the popularity of some games, should they be included in their reports.

All of those resources (and those are just a few of the ones out there), along with looking at what's at the top of sales charts (not player counts) on storefronts like Steam, will be able to paint a much clearer picture if you're looking to dig into a game's success or lack thereof. They still won't give you the full image because, again, the video game industry isn't as transparent as it could be, but it'll be a more reliable image than what you'd get by just looking at SteamDB.

Concurrent player counts are nice to look at, but not insightful

I get why people have been bringing up concurrent player counts more and more in the last couple of years. It's nice to look at the graph and see that thousands, if not millions, of people around the world are all gathered at their computers playing the same game. You can look at that number and be sure that the game sold at least that many copies.

Sometimes it's obvious that a game is doing well. Concurrent player counts can be a part of that picture, but they're not the whole image. There's just so much you don't see on SteamDB, and that's what makes them useless as your one and only point in any discussion about how any particular game or series is performing, or if a recently released game is still popular or dead.