Sony Rolls Out Public PlayStation 5 Player Count Beta Widget

One of the things that makes Steam unique as a platform is the APIs that Valve makes available to players and developers that allow us to see public player count data via sites like Steam Charts and SteamDB. According to recent reports by Mystic on YouTube, Sony is testing a new Community Activity widget in the PlayStation Welcome Hub that will show the top 10 most popular games for the week in question and a “Trending Now” category to show trending games. Trending Now shows increased gameplay hours, while the Top 10 view shows weekly active players and the position in the Top 10 leaderboard. There doesn’t appear to be much more customization than being able to select these two options, and you don’t seem to be able to see historic player counts for specific games.

Notably, this feature is in beta, so it may well change significantly before it hits more players, and it appears to be limited to certain countries at the time of writing. Additionally, although the widget does provide player count information, it’s more like a snapshot of the game’s performance at a specific point in time rather than the ongoing statistics gathered by SteamDB using Valve’s APIs. Information about the most-played games isn’t just useful from a novelty analytics point of view, but it also helps players ascertain if it would be worth investing time and money into a multiplayer game whose entertainment value may be contingent on the presence of other players in-game. Sony’s Top 10 chart is also somewhat flawed, since aside from a few weeks a year when heavyweight launches take place, the popular games on a platform like Steam remain fairly constant—for Steam, the top 10 by player count usually includes Counter-Strike 2, PUBG: Battlegrounds, Apex Legends, Rust, Dota 2, and Terraria, with Warframe and Overwatch making occasional appearances.