Who is playing what,
right now
Not review scores. Not what a publisher paid to put in front of you. Just the number of people with the game open at this minute, and how far it has moved since last week.
| # | Title | Playing now | Weekly peak | Weekly move |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 |  Counter-Strike 2 | 1,270,108 | 1,330,975 | — |
| 02 |  Dota 2 | 860,350 | 848,687 | +1 |
| 03 |  PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS | 713,554 | 783,474 | -1 |
| 04 |  WARDOGS | 325,128 | 342,220 | +1 |
| 05 |  Apex Legends™ | 249,818 | 272,155 | -1 |
| 06 |  Valheim | 219,830 | 225,321 | — |
| 07 |  FiveM | 168,633 | 185,962 | -1 |
| 08 |  Bongo Cat | 165,051 | 174,831 | -6 |
| 09 |  Aniimo | 144,747 | 132,910 | -16 |
| 10 |  Rust | 131,497 | 135,427 | +3 |
Weekly move comes from Steam’s most-played chart, which counts a whole week — so it does not always agree with the minute above.
How much time do you get
in one sitting?
This one filters harder than genre does. A game built around forty-minute matches is a different object from one built around a ninety-minute dungeon, no matter what tag it ships with.
Who is on the other
end of it?
Half the games on the board are unplayable alone and the other half are worse with company. Nobody tells you which is which before you buy.
What counts as
a good night?
A ranked ladder and a save file want opposite things from you. One punishes the night you play tired; the other does not care.
And when you close it,
what stays?
This is the one people get wrong about themselves. Some want the slate wiped every session. Some want to walk back into the same room.
Counter-Strike 2
Rounds end in minutes, the lobby dissolves, and nobody owes you a rematch. You said you want the scoreboard and you want it with strangers — this is the version of that with the deepest bench of people online at any hour.
- Playing now
- 1,281,688
- Released
- Aug 21, 2012
- Studio
- Valve
- Price
- Free to play
Deep Rock Galactic
Missions have a hard stop, four people go in, and there is no ranked ladder to protect. Nobody carries a rating home from a bad night, which is the whole reason a group keeps showing up to it.
- Playing now
- 9,178
- Released
- May 13, 2020
- Studio
- Ghost Ship Games
- Price
- $8.99 · 70% off
- Metacritic
- 85
The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth
Every run starts you back at nothing and ends inside half an hour. The thing that carries over is not a save file, it is you knowing what the items do — which is exactly the kind of getting-better you asked for.
- Playing now
- 83,932
- Released
- Nov 4, 2014
- Studio
- Nicalis, Inc., Edmund McMillen
- Price
- $14.99
ELDEN RING
One long thing, alone, that does not wait for you and does not apologise. Evenings disappear into it and the ending is far enough away to be worth walking to. Do not start it on a Tuesday.
- Playing now
- 47,139
- Released
- Feb 24, 2022
- Studio
- FromSoftware, Inc.
- Price
- $59.99
- Metacritic
- 94
Stardew Valley
Nothing in it can be failed and nothing in it is in a hurry. You close it and the place is still there, a little further along than the last time. That is the entire mechanic, and it is enough.
- Playing now
- 83,210
- Released
- Feb 26, 2016
- Studio
- ConcernedApe
- Price
- $14.99
- Metacritic
- 89
Your four answers, scored
All five games were in the running the whole way down — none of them got eliminated, they just fell behind. This is the tally they were carrying when your last button landed, and how close second place got.
One answer away
Each row below is one of your answers swapped and nothing else touched. Amber means that single change hands you a different game.
Ties go to whoever we typed first
Two games can finish level. Nothing in your answers breaks that, and we do not roll a dice: the tie goes to whichever result block sits higher in this page’s source. That is an accident of the order someone wrote them in, and it is worth knowing how much of the outcome rides on it.
What the order is worth
Same answers, same weights, declaration order reversed. Every place that moves here moved for no reason a player could have influenced.
The worst of them
On these routes four of the five finish on the identical score, so the first-typed one takes it and the other three are invisible.
When you were already decided
Four questions is 256 routes through this page. On a lot of them the answer stops moving before you reach the end — whatever you press after that point cannot change the game you get. Here is where that happens, counted over every route.
Four of these five are not on the board
The table at the top of this page is the ten most-played games on Steam this minute. The matcher does not read from it. Lined up against the bottom row of that table, four of the five games it can hand you would not make the cut — which is the point, but nobody says it out loud.
Those two columns are different ladders
The fine print under the table says the weekly move “does not always agree” with the minute above it. That is understating it. The rank column is a fresh sort by who is playing right now; the move column is a position change on Steam’s weekly playtime chart, which is a different list with different games on it. The page’s own numbers prove they cannot be the same ladder.
Now, against each game’s own weekly peak
On a phone the weekly-peak column is dropped from the table to keep it on screen, so this arithmetic is not one you can do by looking. A game at 95% is close to its own busiest moment of the week. Anything over 100% is reading more players right now than its peak for the whole week, which cannot be true of one clock and is the clearest sign there are two.