To celebrate the five year anniversary of the PS4, Sony recently launched “My PS4 Life,” a marketing campaign that creates videos highlighting players’ individual stats and milestones.
It turns out that some of the data shown in these videos can also be used to reverse-engineer how many people have played certain PS4 games, shedding some light on a subject that game publishers normally keep secret.
In a post over on the PS4 subreddit, Reddit user gamestat explains how each of these My PS4 Life videos includes the total number of trophies earned in a particular category for a particular game.
Since the percentage of a game’s players who have a specific trophy is already publicly available on the PlayStation website, it’s possible to combine the two pieces of information to get the total number of players a game has on PS4.
For example, one of the videos says that 15,448 players have the platinum trophy, Andromeda’s Finest, for Mass Effect: Andromeda. According to the PlayStation website, that trophy has a .7% completion rate.
That means that approximately 2,206,857 people have played the game on PS4. Gamestat has been using this method to create a list of player numbers for various games, and while it’s not comprehensive, it does offer an interesting look at the platform that goes far beyond the NPD Group’s vague monthly rankings of game sales.
It’s important to remember that this player data isn’t a one to one match for total sales of a particular game. Games which were discounted or temporarily free with a paid PS Plus subscription will have inflated player counts.
The player counts will also be skewed since it’s possible for more than one PlayStation Account to play a single game on a single PS4. Used copies of games also make it impossible to equate player counts to actual sales.
Not surprisingly, Grand Theft Auto V is the platform’s most-played game based on the data, with roughly 51,700,000 players world wide. A little less obvious is the success of FIFA. With 32,500,000 players for FIFA 18, 30,000,000 for FIFA 17, and 28,300,000 for FIFA 16, it’s clear why EA has stayed committed to annualised sequels. There’s no data for Madden for comparison, while NBA 2K18 is currently sitting much lower at 9,400,000 players.
Here are some of the other player counts:
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Doom: 3,900,000
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The Last Guardian: 1,940,000
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Uncharted: The Lost Legacy: 3,890,000
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Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus: 1,437,000
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Detroit: Become Human: 2,440,000
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Shadow of the Tomb Raider: 1,150,000
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Red Dead Redemption 2: 6,110,000
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Fallout 76: 407,000
The list is still missing most PS4 games, including some big ones like Spider-Man and God of War, but it’s likely to grow as people share more and more of their My PS4 Life videos, assuming Sony doesn’t quickly remove the trophy numbers.
In either case, the data offers some brief but fascinating insights into what people are playing on the platform, as well as what they aren’t.
Comments
21 responses to “New Trophy Data Reveals How Many People Are Playing Certain PS4 Games”
Intriguing! I love data!
I just did mine. I am quite horrified at just how many hours it says I have spent on my PS4 😐
I wonder if that’s actual play time on games, or if it just includes time that the console was switched on and signed in ie watching Netflix, playing BluRay or Spotify or just sitting there idle. God I hope it includes all of those things 😐
Yeah, mine’s like 4500 hours or so. Slightly alarming.
On the other hand, I learned that I am one of less than 300 people with the platinum for Armello.
6574 total hours for me. That’s a bit alarming. 1014 hrs just in overwatch
That’s a lot of Overwatch! It was my most played game but only about 450 hours in it. I stopped playing after Sombra but did briefly try out Orisa. I think I just got tired of the loot box grind.
I thought my 378 hours on Battlefield 4 was bad enough! 😛
I know right. You’d think I’d actually be good at it.
The grind doesn’t bother me too much. Mainly because I’m not that concerned if I get a skin or not.
I’m one of 27 people to platinum Mind Labyrinth lol
You’d think for 300+ hours of rocket league I’d actually be good… That’s 300+ hours of pissing off my team mates, yay!
Ha ha, you are probably one of only 27 people (28 now) who know of the existence of Mind Labyrinth 😛
There are certainly a lot of quirky VR games out there. I’ve only tried a few at my mate’s place, but if I had a PSVR I’d definitely grab Moss.
That is true. I got a free code for it, otherwise I would probably have never played it.
Grab yourself a PSVR then get Beat Saber and Moss to start you off…Then get Mind Labyrinth to join the secret Platinum club haha
So tempting! My mate says Beat Saber is awesome.
Sold! Christmas is next week, let Santa know…and if you don’t believe in Santa, then…well, what kind of person are you!!!
Oof, 4709 hours. 1253 of those on The Division alone. Got my moneys worth from that one.
Fallout 76 ones could also be out of whack for anyone playing a character they started in the beta. The achievements don’t track unless they start a new character.
That shouldn’t matter for this purpose though: Sony still knows you’ve played a game even if you haven’t earned any trophies. They’d use that to calculate the trophy percentages, so working backwards should still give the number of total players.
I thought 400k seemed oddly low.
So trophies don’t drop if your using your beta character?
Yeah, Bethesda posted something about it on twitter at launch. Told people to create a new character if they wanted to track achievements.
The other side of that coin is that it would be interesting to see how many people played it in BETA, and then opted out afterwards. You would expect that data would be important for any credible company…no doubts Beth wouldn’t want that made public though, wouldn’t fit their narrative.
That’s not reverse-engineering. That’s just math.
Sony HQ, Somewhere:
“Sir, they’ve begun working out how many people have played games on PS4.”
“Is it hackers reverse engineering our cleverly encrypted data?”
“No sir. It’s just plain old math.”
“Math!? Get me Mrs. Rickenbacker, now.”
“Who sir?”
“My fourth grade math teacher. We’ll see how clever these people are after they’e had their knuckles rapped with a ruler.”
Couldn’t you do this on Xbox I remember Trueachievements using some sort of dodgy shit to get people’s achievement data that wasn’t strictly in line with Microsoft’s policy on third parties or something making money out of it or whatever.
Xboxachievements had some big bitch about it at one point saying it wasn’t cool something about there trackers pulling data, only for user accounts though they weren’t pulling anyone’s data that didn’t have an account with TA.
interestingly it picked as my rarest trophy not a ps4 game but a vita game ? However the games for the hours all looked right (Dark Souls 2, Dark Souls 3 and Killzone Shadowfall)