Sony Tries To Celebrate PS4 Players, Accidentally Ends Up Revealing Player Counts For Games

You probably know about the My PS4 Life celebration feature Sony recently put out—to celebrate five years of the PS4, they would allow players to generate a video sharing their stats of their PS4 game playing career. It was a pretty neat feature, and a great way to celebrate the players who have made the PS4 the most successful current console in the world.

So naturally, Sony found a way to mess it all up. You see, one of the things they did in this video was give you the exact number of players who have earned Trophies that you have earned. That’s pretty cool—except the PS4 also gives you a percentage count for every Trophy (as in, exactly what percentage of a game’s total players have unlocked it). Putting the two together, fans have managed to extrapolate the player counts of several PS4 games.

For instance, we know that FIFA 18 has 32.5 million players, FIFA 17 has 30 million, Minecraft has 25.6 million, Rocket League has 22.6 million, Detroit: Become Human has 2.4 million, DOOM has 3 million, and Fallout 76 has a catastrophically low 407,000 players.

There are some things to keep in mind here: this is player count, not sales, and the two don’t always correlate (for instance, if a game was given away for free on PS Plus, that will inflate player counts, but not sales). Secondly, we don’t know the data is through to—in other words, if it is only through to, say, November 18, then some low numbers can be easily explained. Thirdly, Sony may have revealed a lot of confidential and proprietary data their third party partners did not want revealed. And lastly, that Fallout number is very low- it looks like the bad reviews are really affecting its performance.