What people are actually playing right now
A score tells you how a game was received. It does not tell you whether anyone still cares. This page tracks three signals across 1518 games and, more usefully, how each has moved. Nothing here is a sales figure, and we say what each measure is not.
The three signals, and what each one is not
Attention
Wikipedia pageviews over 28 days, against the 28 before.
- Moves fast, on news, patches and announcements
- Works for console exclusives with no Steam presence
- Not sales. People read about games they will never buy
Active players
Steam concurrent players, read live.
- The only signal here that is people actually playing
- PC only, and a snapshot rather than a peak
- Not a total. It misses console, mobile and everyone offline
Search demand
Average monthly searches, US, from Google Keyword Planner.
- Google's own figures, not a third-party estimate
- A twelve-month average, so it moves slowly
- Not brand-clean. Short titles pull in the character and browser clones
Rising fastest
345 games up more than 10%Attention over the last 28 days against the 28 before. A jump this size almost always has a cause: an announcement, a sale, a show, or an anniversary. It is the first place to look when deciding what to cover next.
| Game | Pageviews 28d | Change | Search/mo | Playing now |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Terranigma | 31,915 | +452.2% | — | — |
| Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 | 44,124 | +379.9% | — | — |
| Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Future Soldier | 16,381 | +279.5% | — | 59 |
| Quake 4 | 18,910 | +188.5% | — | 27 |
| Kingdom Hearts III | 49,587 | +180.1% | — | — |
| Kingdom Hearts | 53,983 | +170.7% | — | — |
| The Lord of the Rings: Conquest | 10,678 | +163.3% | — | — |
| A Plague Tale: Requiem | 33,689 | +146.3% | — | 570 |
| Grand Theft Auto VI | 513,711 | +141.8% | — | — |
| Untitled Goose Game | 18,413 | +137.7% | — | 244 |
Falling fastest
270 games down more than 10%Decline is usually less interesting than it looks. Annual sports releases fall every year as the next one lands, and a game that spiked on news falls back once the news passes. Sustained decline across several readings is the signal worth acting on.
| Game | Pageviews 28d | Change | Search/mo | Playing now |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa | 2,578 | -69.4% | — | — |
| Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag | 38,899 | -68.4% | — | 449 |
| Doom: The Dark Ages | 26,315 | -66.1% | — | 1,855 |
| World Cup 98 | 1,862 | -65.3% | — | — |
| 2006 FIFA World Cup | 2,225 | -61.8% | — | — |
| FIFA 16 | 3,415 | -58.4% | — | — |
| Call of Duty: Black Ops II | 28,387 | -58.3% | — | 133 |
| 2002 FIFA World Cup | 1,728 | -56.5% | — | — |
Searched far more than they are read about
The ratio of monthly searches to pageviews says something the raw numbers do not. A game people search constantly but rarely read about is a game people want to play right now, not learn about. Browser games, mobile games and anything with a free version dominate this list, and that is a different kind of popularity from the sort a review earns.
| Game | Searches/mo | Pageviews 28d | Ratio |
|---|
Biggest right now
Most played on Steam
- Dota 2 807,926
- Apex Legends 173,794
- Palworld 171,012
- Rust 103,314
- Grand Theft Auto V 85,573
- Stardew Valley 75,902
- War Thunder 74,803
- Warframe 59,736
- Dead by Daylight 56,680
- Terraria 56,541
Most searched
How this is measured
What moves these numbers
- A new reading lands and everything is recomputed. Nothing is edited by hand.
- A game with thin evidence stays off the list rather than being estimated. No Wikipedia article and no Steam listing means it does not appear at all.
- Velocity needs two readings. A game's first run records a level, not a trend, and we show a dash rather than a zero.
Sources
- Attention. Wikimedia REST pageviews API, English Wikipedia, human traffic only.
- Active players. Steam
GetNumberOfCurrentPlayers, read at the time shown. - Search demand. Google Keyword Planner through the Google Ads API. Google's own figures. We do not substitute a third-party estimate, because the point of this signal is that it is the real number.
The limits, stated plainly
None of these is a sales figure. No publisher releases those, and any site showing you one has estimated it. Attention measures curiosity, concurrents measure PC players at one moment, and search measures intent.
Search volume for short titles is not brand-clean. Entries marked broad pull in people looking for the character, the film, a browser clone or a Google doodle. Pac-Man returns over two million searches a month and very few of those people want the 1980 arcade cabinet. We flag rather than silently trust.
Wikipedia skews to games people discuss. A landmark title with a long article outranks a bigger seller nobody writes about. That is a feature when measuring cultural reach and a bug when measuring commercial success, and the two get confused constantly.
Popularity feeds the ranked lists at a weight of 20 percent, alongside player sentiment and critic scores. See how the lists are built, or the axis picker to plot any of these against each other.