Nobody Needs To Know How Many People Are Playing A Singleplayer Video Game. Nobody!

One of the worst aspects of current, toxic video game discourse has been the idea that, at any given moment, every single video game can and must have its playerbase statistically scrutinised. If the number of people playing a game is ever found to be an unacceptable number, then I'm afraid that's it. That game is in trouble. Maybe even dead.

Whether it's the press or an irate group of fans making the call, the process involved in this kangaroo court is normally the same: people take a look on Steam and console charts, see how many folks are playing a game, then report on their findings, usually as some kind of proof that the game is "dead".

Here is a prominent example from November 2023:

Aside from other issues with this headline--what do you mean "Could be", who's making the call here?--let's break this down. Starfield was released on September 6, means it had been out for almost three months at the time of that tweet. It's a singleplayer video game, one with huge preorder/launch week interest that subsequently reviewed...not poorly, but not what Bethesda would have been expecting or hoping for, either. It would have taken most players around 20-30 hours to finish up, and while a few obsessives will always play longer trying to rinse it, and there will always be a trickle of new players, for the vast majority of people taking part in online discourse about video games in November 2023, Starfield was done.

So of course its player numbers plummeted. It's not a live service or multiplayer game! If we were tracking the number of people playing Destiny or Fortnite, games specifically reliant on the number of people playing them, then sure, surges and drops in that count are important. But Starfield is a singleplayer video game! Most people who bought it are done with it. This is normal, and the fact it has been turned into something here is weird and gross.

Anyone concerned with a singleplayer video game's player count has been live service-pilled. The AAA video game industry's insistence that every major video game must now be played forever--look at the death march Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Valhalla subjected players to--has begun soaking into the wider consciousness, and so when a game fails to hold our interest for months on end, it's somehow--for the live service-pilled among us, anyway--now seen as a failure.

Speaking of Assassin's Creed, its latest release, Mirage, is another game I've seen subjected to the same kind of scrutiny, and for the same deranged reasons. Here's a story with the headline "Assassin's Creed Mirage has big 68% drop in PS5 players in first month", which then goes onto...spell out the exact reason for this, namely that it's a singleplayer game in a busy time of the year for video game releases. And here's GameSpot not just talking about Cyberpunk 2077's player count, but using that number as a stick to beat Starfield with. Two different games, unrelated to each other except for the fact they're singleplayer video releases.

More recently, here's PCGamesN making note of what looks like a huge drop in Black Myth: Wukong's playerbase, a game that has only been out for a few days:

If you're a games writer, you don't need to be worrying about this shit! If you're a normal person taking part in video game discussions, you definitely do not need to be worrying about this shit. At best you're doing a AAA publisher's work in helping condition people to the idea all games must be played forever, and at worst you're doing your part in propagating toxic tribalism in video game fandom.

What you could be doing instead of scrutinizing numbers is enjoying a singleplayer video game for what it is, then getting on with your lives. Indeed, that's the best way to enjoy them!

This article was originally published in November 2023. It has been updated with more recent examples.