PS4 player numbers may have accidentally been disclosed by Sony thanks to their recent My PS4 Life videos that debuted just a few days ago.
While some gaming platforms and services have no issue with releasing player counts, the PS4 player numbers have largely been kept secret by Sony. Unfortunately for the Japanese giant, it might have just tipped its own hand for some of the platform’s games.
A Redditor appropriately named /u/gamstat posted a startling fact on the /r/PS4 subreddit: the My PS4 Life videos were giving away player counts in a roundabout way. One part of the video highlights your rarest trophy and shows you exactly how many players have received it. The percentage of players who have received that trophy can be seen elsewhere in the PlayStation ecosystem. From there, it’s a simple bit of math.
Here’s an example of how PS4 player numbers could be calculated. Suppose that your My PS4 Life video showed that you got the “I Totally Rock” trophy in the fictional game Rock Dudes Totally Rock 4: The Rockening and that a total of 21,252 people got that trophy. The stats in the PlayStation ecosystem show that only 1% of people got that trophy. Do a bit of quick maths – 21,252 x 100 – and you have an estimate of 2,125,200 players for RDTR4: The Rockening.
/u/gamstat took this method and compiled a list of games using My PS4 Life videos and the publicly-available trophy stats. This method should give us a relatively close estimate of how many people are playing games on Sony’s home console. Here’s the top 10, according to /u/gamstat’s calculations:
PS4 Player Numbers – /u/gamstat’s Top 10 (estimated)
- Grand Theft Auto V – 51,700,000
- FIFA 18 – 32,500,000
- FIFA 17 – 30,000,000
- FIFA 16 – 28,300,000
- Minecraft (PlayStation 4 Edition) – 25,600,000
- Call of Duty WWII – 24,600,000
- Rocket League – 22,600,000
- FIFA 15 – 19,200,000
- Fortnite – 16,200,000
- The Last of Us: Remastered – 15,900,000
Some of these games (like Fortnite) have different regions for trophies. In those cases, /u/gamstat combined all of the regions together in order to produce a more accurate count. Newer games released after December 4 can’t provide accurate numbers at all, though.
The methodology certainly seems sound at a glance, but there isn’t an obvious way to verify these numbers independently without one of the developers or Sony themselves giving out specifics. We may never get completely accurate PS4 player numbers anytime soon, but one ingenious Redditor appears to have gotten as close as we can hope to get.
