Stephen BrenishMost market research decks I see in pitch meetings quote Steam numbers that are six months old. The table below is the live version: the top 15 games on Steam ranked by peak concurrent players over the trailing two weeks, refreshed automatically every Monday from SteamSpy data.
| # | Game | Developer | Est. owners | Peak players | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Counter-Strike 2 | Valve | 100,000,000 - 200,000,000 | 1,013,936 | Free |
| 2 | PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS | PUBG Corporation | 100,000,000 - 200,000,000 | 314,682 | Free |
| 3 | Rust | Facepunch Studios | 20,000,000 - 50,000,000 | 143,870 | $19.99 |
| 4 | Apex Legends | Respawn | 100,000,000 - 200,000,000 | 124,262 | Free |
| 5 | Wallpaper Engine | Wallpaper Engine Team | 20,000,000 - 50,000,000 | 91,184 | $4.99 |
| 6 | Grand Theft Auto V Legacy | Rockstar North | 50,000,000 - 100,000,000 | 67,851 | Free |
| 7 | Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II | Treyarch, Raven Software +7 more | 50,000,000 - 100,000,000 | 67,419 | $38.49 |
| 8 | NARAKA: BLADEPOINT | 24 Entertainment | 10,000,000 - 20,000,000 | 66,954 | Free |
| 9 | Baldur's Gate 3 | Larian Studios | 20,000,000 - 50,000,000 | 54,771 | $44.99 |
| 10 | HELLDIVERS 2 | Arrowhead Game Studios | 20,000,000 - 50,000,000 | 53,399 | $39.99 |
| 11 | Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege | Ubisoft Montreal | 20,000,000 - 50,000,000 | 51,847 | $19.99 |
| 12 | Stardew Valley | ConcernedApe | 20,000,000 - 50,000,000 | 50,662 | $14.99 |
| 13 | War Thunder | Gaijin Entertainment | 20,000,000 - 50,000,000 | 50,478 | Free |
| 14 | Dead by Daylight | Behaviour Interactive Inc. | 20,000,000 - 50,000,000 | 44,886 | $19.99 |
| 15 | Team Fortress 2 | Valve | 50,000,000 - 100,000,000 | 43,819 | Free |
Data: SteamSpy (top by concurrent players, trailing 2 weeks). Refreshed weekly; last update 2026-11-09.
Why concurrents beat revenue charts for production planning
Revenue charts reward launch spikes and price points. Concurrent players reward retention, and retention is the number that should shape your production decisions. A game holding six figures of concurrents years after launch is telling you something about its content cadence, its community loop, and how much post-launch staffing it takes to stay there.
Two patterns worth noticing whenever you scan this table. First, free-to-play service games dominate the top slots, but the middle of the table is where premium indies and mid-budget titles live, and that band is the realistic comp set for most teams reading this. Second, the ownership column runs on wide ranges for a reason: Steam stopped exposing precise counts, so treat owners as an order-of-magnitude signal and concurrents as the ground truth.
If you are building a pitch, screenshot this table with a date on it. Publishers respect current data, and the date proves you did not pull it from a two-year-old GDC talk.