Read the signal correctly

Methodology before magnitude.

“Players” can mean people online this second, a peak within ten minutes, unique accounts in a week, or an estimate from a sample. GamePulse preserves those differences.

Live CCU

Playing right now

A platform-reported concurrent count at a specific moment. Steam is the main public source. It excludes players disconnected from Steam and says nothing about other storefronts.

Peak CCU

Highest in a window

The maximum concurrency during a stated period. Fortnite's public API uses windowed peak CCU, so it is not compared directly with an instantaneous Steam sample.

Active estimate

Modeled audience

A third party's estimate based on samples or custom sources. The provider and confidence badge stay attached; estimates are never silently promoted to official counts.

Popularity rank

Relative position

A platform chart position without a published count. Rank movement is useful evidence of momentum, but rank 1 does not disclose how many people are playing.

GamePulse score

How “Hype right now” works

GamePulse evaluates change over 1 hour, 6 hours, 24 hours, and 7 days, plus the same hour of prior weeks when enough history exists. It reverses rank movement so an improving rank is positive, then weights momentum by persistence, sample completeness, source confidence, and an audience floor.

That makes the score a momentum indicator—not an audience estimate. A small game can be moving quickly while a much larger game remains steady.

Cross-platform limits

Crossplay is not deduplication

Crossplay tells you that players on different systems may share matches. It does not reveal whether the same person played on multiple platforms. GamePulse therefore shows platform slices separately and does not add them into a supposedly exact global total.

Ecosystem summaries

Roblox and Fortnite retain their child records

The main dashboard presents Roblox and Fortnite as single parent ecosystems so individual experiences and islands do not overwhelm the game explorer. Dedicated breakdown pages retain every tracked child and its original source record.

Roblox's parent CCU is the sum of only the tracked experiences in the current snapshot. It is not a Roblox-wide total. Fortnite's parent peak is the sum of tracked island peaks; because those peaks can occur at different times, it is neither simultaneous activity nor a Fortnite-wide total. These partial aggregates are excluded from comparable-audience charts and Hype scoring.

Review Roblox coverage · Review Fortnite coverage

Source policy

Official, third-party, and unavailable

High confidence: official value or official rank, represented with its published coverage.
Medium confidence: documented third-party measurement with a stable methodology.
Low confidence: estimate whose upstream inputs vary or cannot be independently verified.

Steam's authenticated application catalog supplies the large candidate pool. A persisted queue polls hot titles frequently, warm titles hourly, and cold long-tail titles daily under a hard transactional request budget with reserved headroom. SteamSpy may influence optional discovery ordering, but its estimates are never displayed or scored: every visible concurrent-player value comes from Steam's official API.

Microsoft publishes separate regional Xbox-console and Microsoft Store PC popularity charts but no title-level CCU, so GamePulse records their ordering only. EVE Online publishes its Tranquility server population through ESI, and Old School RuneScape publishes per-world populations; those are summed as official live signals with their coverage attached.

Roblox's official Games API reports live players, visits, and favorites for individual experiences. GamePulse follows a reviewed watchlist in bounded batches and labels its tracked-experience sum as partial coverage, never as Roblox's global population. The public Roblox chart page currently exposes no stable, reviewable universe identifiers, so private discovery endpoints are not used. Toontown Rewritten, Wynncraft, and Second Life also publish official live network populations.

Configured Minecraft Java servers are queried directly with the server-list ping protocol and remain named-server populations. Optional BattleMetrics server IDs and Hypixel's official aggregate are disabled until credentials and source enablement are configured. Apple and Microsoft contribute separate regional ranks, while Guild Wars 2 contributes categorical world status; none is converted into a player count. Twitch attention begins with official top categories and paginates per category; results that hit the configured cap are explicitly labeled sampled.

Epic Games Store, EA App, Riot, and Battle.net do not publish supported global title-level live counts. Their games can still appear through an official Steam subset, Fortnite's public island metrics, or another platform's ranking, but GamePulse does not present that slice as the publisher's total audience. PlayStation weekly activity is entered from reviewed public snapshots because Sony provides no supported API. Nintendo remains unavailable until a lawful documented source is configured.

official live

Steam Web API

Steam-connected players by application

Enabled · global · high confidence

Terms reviewed 2026-10-02

Methodology before magnitude.

Playing right now

Highest in a window

Modeled audience

Relative position

How “Hype right now” works

Crossplay is not deduplication

Roblox and Fortnite retain their child records

Official, third-party, and unavailable

Steam Web API

Fortnite Data API

Xbox / Microsoft Store Charts

EVE Online ESI

Old School RuneScape Worlds

Roblox Games API

Toontown Rewritten Population API

Wynncraft API

Second Life Statistics

PlayStation Weekly Activity

GamesDB

SteamSpy Discovery Feed

Steam Store Service Catalog

Roblox Discovery

Minecraft Server Status

Apple App Store Charts

Twitch Helix

Wikimedia Pageviews

Guild Wars 2 Worlds API

Nintendo eShop Charts

Epic Games Store Charts

BattleMetrics Servers

Hypixel Public API