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I'm trying to get an idea, for popular online multiplayer computer games, of what percentage of total players are online at one time. For example if game A has a user base of 100000 and 10000 of them are online at one time then the percentage is of 10.

I only want to know for games that are exclusively on computers and that are online multiplayer (not singleplayer).

From Steam stats we can know how many are playing the most popular games, now if some of them had official numbers for their userbase... http://store.steampowered.com/stats/

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@CruelCow what am I supposed to see there ? the guy is asking precisely the opposite thing – user2534 Jun 14 '11 at 17:48
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I don't think you are going to get a answer on this, because I don't recall any company giving out their exact numbers on accounts. It's always like "More than 400000" or "Almost 1 million users!" – Simon Jun 14 '11 at 18:05
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Not to mention it will change over time. Voting to close as "too localized". – Raven Dreamer♦ Jun 14 '11 at 20:58
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Please make sure your question title actually matches what you're asking. It's basic netiquette. – badp♦ Jun 15 '11 at 9:52
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closed as too localized by Raven Dreamer♦, bwarner, Bora, Doozer Blake, ChrisF Jun 15 '11 at 14:15

This question is unlikely to help any future visitors; it is only relevant to a small geographic area, a specific moment in time, or an extraordinarily narrow situation that is not generally applicable to the worldwide audience of the internet. For help making this question more broadly applicable, see the FAQ.

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If you're asking for just the data right now, this question is definitely too localized. So I'll assume you're actually asking for how to figure this out at any given point in time.

Unfortunately the answer to that is, you really can't. I am assuming by "user base" you mean "number of copies sold". The NPD tracks retail sales of games, but they can only estimate digital sales of games (source). Steam has specifically said that they don't want to release their actual numbers to the public (mostly because they prefer game companies pay them for access to the numbers). So the best you could do is trust the NPD estimates and add up the NPD numbers (this site lists the top 10 for each month) over the months that the game was available. This would give you an idea of how many copies have been sold.

But even then, you wouldn't be able to track the total number of users online. The Steam stats will only give you Steam users, so if you divide Steam users by all copies sold, you're going to get a much lower percentage than reality. You could improve on your estimate by finding other things that track number of users like XFire and adding them in.

So at the end of the day, you're going to come up with a number that has been through 5 levels of estimates, and probably isn't going to be useful for much of anything.

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I was more thinking that a couple of peple could somehow know those data for one or more games and so we could get an idea. – user2534 Jun 16 '11 at 9:37

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