Steam provides an unusual level of insight into what’s popular on the platform and how games are performing. While user reviews and charts of concurrent player counts can be weaponized to push toxic agendas, they also provide useful data points for tracking broader movements around which games are trending and why. Console storefronts on Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5, meanwhile, are effectively black boxes. Outside of lists of the top-selling games at any given moment, we don’t know much about who’s actually playing what. That could be changing.
As spotted by PlayStation YouTuber Mystic (via CharlieIntel), Sony has rolled out a new widget on the PS5 home screen for beta testing. It shows not only the most-played games in your region, but also exactly how many people are playing them in a given week. An early glimpse of the feature in action provides the following list of the top eight most-played games this week in the U.S.:
- Fortnite: 14.6m
- Grand Theft Auto 5: 5.13m
- Minecraft: 4.97m
- Call of Duty: 4.95m
- Apex Legends: 1.72m
- Marvel Rivals: 1.58m
- Battlefield 6: 1.51m
- ARC Raiders: 972k
As Mystic points out, this list isn’t likely to change that much week to week, and it’s still far from the more granular level of detail you can get for the entirety of Steam. Even so, this will be the first time people are actually able to see just how many weekly players it takes to be in the top-10, and it is likely to shift around as new games become popular, like when GTA 6 launches later this year.
The YouTuber also pointed to a second ranking that the widget displays. This one is a trending list based on big jumps in player activity week-to-week. It doesn’t show you the total weekly players for these games, but it does break out other metrics like the percentage jump in total playtime for something like Company of Heroes 3. It’s certainly one way that PlayStation could indirectly surface games that recently received meaningful updates or new DLC, something the platform is currently terrible at.
It’s still a far cry from the level of transparency and visibility available on Steam, but it might signal that Sony is finally looking at ways to improve discoverability and a larger sense of what people who aren’t on your friends list are doing on PS5. Maybe it finally feels the need to compete more directly with Valve as the launch of its Steam Machine living room console gets closer. Or this is just a fun little widget that the company doesn’t plan on doing anything further with.
