Game Success Metrics

People don't understand Steam player numbers, Palworld lead says: "Poor Marathon and stuff are getting dragged through the mud ... I'm sure our day's coming"

John Buckley, publishing lead at Pocketpair, believes that the focus on Steam player numbers as a sole metric for game success is misleading. He argues that player falloff is normal and that concurrent user counts don't tell the whole story, especially for multiplatform games. Buckley suggests that Daily Active Users (DAU) would be a more informative metric for understanding a game's actual player base.