The same one place, — times the players

Two ladders, the same hundred games

Left rail: the hundred drawn the way a numbered list draws them, one rung per place. Right rail: the same hundred at the height their peak player count puts them. Every line connects one game to itself.

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Type a number of players, find its place

We drop your number into the hundred and report the place it takes. No model, no forecast — just where that many players would stand among these hundred games this week.

What one place costs, by where you stand

The ladder split into four stretches. Each row is what it takes to climb that stretch, and what one place inside it costs on average.

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The hundred counted as people, not as places

Everything above measures the gap between two neighbours. The same hundred numbers answer a second question they are never asked: not how far apart the games sit, but how the players are shared out among them. Add all hundred peaks together and you get — — not a crowd that ever stood anywhere at one moment, but a hundred separate high-water marks. For asking how the players split between these games, it is the right number.

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Your number, measured twice

The same number you typed further up, read off both rails at once. Nothing new to fill in — change it up there and these change with it. On one rail a place is a place. On the other, a place is however many people happen to be standing on it.

Where the board actually breaks

A break is a step much bigger than the steps around it. Ask this list for its biggest break in players and its biggest break in multiples and you get two different rungs — and it is the second one that behaves like a line between tiers.

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Where every number on this page comes from

1. The hundred. The same official Steam most-played response the full table on this site is built from, one request, a hundred rows. This page uses one column of it: the highest number of players in each game at one time during the chart’s week.
2. The ladder. We sort those hundred by that peak, biggest first. That is our sorting, not a Steam chart. Steam’s own rank is by how much a game gets played and puts the list in a different order — which is what the other page here is about.
3. One place. The difference between two neighbours’ peaks. Nothing is modelled, smoothed or fitted.
4. Your number. Inserted into the sorted list. A number equal to a game’s peak takes the higher place, the same way a tie is scored in a race.
5. Plus ten thousand. We add ten thousand to your number and insert it again. It assumes nobody else moves, which is why it is a measure of the ladder’s shape and not a prediction.
6. The four stretches. Averages over the steps inside each one. An average hides the single widest step, which is why that step is printed on its own at the top of this page.
7. Adding the peaks up. The hundred peaks summed. Each one happened at its own moment in the week, so the total is not a crowd that ever existed — it is a hundred high-water marks in one bucket. We only ever use it as a denominator: what share of it one game or one stretch accounts for.
8. The two rails. The same number you typed, placed twice. Once by how many of the hundred names it beats, once by how many players are inside those names. Both are counts of things already printed on this page.
9. Multiples. One neighbour’s peak divided by the next one’s. The same ninety-nine gaps as everywhere else on this page, read in a different unit. Nothing is normalised or weighted.
10. What a peak is not. One moment in one week. Not players who own the game, not hours, not money, not quality. A game with a big launch and nobody left can still sit high on this ladder for a week.