Valve Leaks Lifetime Player Numbers, Putting Team Fortress 2 Comfortably On Top

Valve does the community a major solid by offering many statistics to us mere mortals to get an idea on what hardware people are running, and which games people are playing. Unfortunately, getting super-specific information is difficult, because there’s a lot that Valve would like to keep close to its chest. Fortunately for the rest of us, a now-patched leak gives us greater insights than we’ve had before.

While anyone can easily see which games are being played on Steam, and by how many people, getting lifetime stats has been impossible, making it likewise impossible to get a true gauge as to how some titles have fared over the long-haul. Ars Technica managed to procure a bunch of information before an API leak was patched-up, and thanks to that, we get some interesting tidbits.

The above is a paste from the aforementioned article, showing the top 10 games on Steam over the course of its entire lifetime. There are a couple of interesting things to takeaway here. First is the fact that PUBG is the only non-Valve title to break the top three, which says quite a bit given its price is much higher than Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. At regular price, that’s over $1 billion in sales generated for PUBG.

Team Fortress 2; Credit: TheGreatSaint:D

Admittedly, I’ve never even heard of Paladins and Unturned, but both have an incredible number of players on the service. What’s confusing to me is how Dota 2 hasn’t made the list at all, despite the fact that it’d have to rank near the top (Addendum: Only games with achievements appear in the list). It definitely seems likely that nothing can beat out TF2‘s 50 million players, though. That is a seriously impressive stat.

The more that the list is pored over, the more interesting tidbits can be found. Is it sad that Half-Life 2 peaked at 8.8 million, when a game based on its engine, Garry’s Mod, enjoyed 18.5 million? And we wonder why we haven’t seen a Half-Life 3? Both Portal titles have had more players than Half-Life 2: 12% more played Portal, and 48% more played Portal 2.

According to this list, 335 titles on Steam have had at least 1 million owners. The biggest downside about this list is the simple fact that we won’t see it updated, since it’s privileged information Valve doesn’t want us to have. At least we got some better insight, though.