Data sources
Almost everything on SteamPlayerBase is Steam’s own public data. A few other public sources fill gaps Steam leaves, and this page says what each one provides.
Steam
- Player counts: Steam’s public Web API (each game’s current players) and Steam’s live chart of the most played games. How often we ask is on How we count Steam players.
- Store details: the Steam store’s public data for names, descriptions, developers and publishers, release dates, platforms and languages, tags, reviews, Steam Deck status, sales and the weekly top sellers.
- New games and updates: Steam’s public change feed, which we read every 15 seconds, for new apps, new builds, renames and release dates, plus Steam’s news and events for patch notes. Games taken off the store are found by checking every game’s store listing.
- Steam Community Market: item prices for the market and inventory pages.
- Your own Steam data, only if you sign in: your public library, wishlist and inventory, read as the privacy policy describes.
- Game art is loaded directly from Steam and belongs to its owners.
Prices
- Steam prices come from the Steam store. We save the US price each time it changes, which is where our price history comes from. Where we show a price in your own currency, it is Steam’s price in your country’s store.
- Other key stores: current US prices at authorized Steam key stores, and the lowest price a game has had at any of them, come from a public price-comparison service. Links to those stores go through that service, as its terms ask.
- Games Steam no longer sells: their last price comes from archived copies of their store page.
- Affiliate links: some store links earn us a commission (see About). That never changes the prices we show.
Player history from before we tracked a game
For games that were on Steam before we started tracking them, older monthly peaks and recent hourly points come from a public player-history archive that has recorded Steam’s player counts since 2012. Each game’s history is imported once. Where it and our own counts overlap, the higher number is kept. While our own history is still short, for the site’s launch period some all-time peaks were also checked against two other public trackers, with their operators’ OK. Those checks can only raise a peak, and that use ends on January 1, 2027.
Other sources
- Owner estimates: a public estimate service’s estimate of how many accounts own a game, shown as a range. For DLC and others it doesn’t cover, we estimate a range from the review count and mark it.
- Linux and Steam Deck ratings: community ratings from a public compatibility database.
- Esports teams: team names, regions and logos come from a public esports wiki.
- Flag images: open-licensed emoji artwork (CC BY 4.0), credited in the footer as its licence asks.
Not affiliated
SteamPlayerBase isn’t affiliated with Valve, Steam or any of the sources above. Steam and the Steam logo are trademarks of Valve Corporation. If you think a number from one of these sources is wrong, tell us.