Concurrent means at the same time.
Steam’s player-count endpoint measures connected users currently active in an app. It does not report the number of people who played at any time during a day or month.
For example, 10,000 concurrent clients is not the same as 10,000 daily active users. Different people can enter and leave during the day. You cannot reliably convert a concurrent reading into unique daily or monthly players without additional data.
Average players and peaks answer different questions
A monthly average summarizes sampled concurrency over a calendar month. A recorded peak is the highest reading captured by a collector. Neither guarantees that every moment was observed. A short burst between samples can be missed.
Our longer-term summaries use Steam Charts’ hourly observations. Our own short-term chart uses the readings collected by deadgames.gg. We label these sources separately and do not merge them into a synthetic history.
Steam is a platform boundary
Other launchers, consoles and mobile editions do not become part of the Steam app’s count simply because the game has the same name. Cross-platform support does not make Steam’s endpoint a total for all platforms.
Running clients are not always players in matches
Single-player sessions, idle clients, and bots can be included. A game may have several modes sharing the same app. Steam concurrency does not tell us which clients are ready to join the same lobby as you.
Missing data is different from zero
A valid Steam response containing zero is a recorded observation. A timeout, unavailable app, or malformed response is a missing observation. deadgames.gg preserves that distinction and labels old successful results as stale.
Explore the methodology or look up a Steam game to see these distinctions in practice.