Learning from data

Ever wanted to know how many people own a game, how many are actively playing it, or how it has fared over the years? PlayTracker Insight is the place to go.

The data of all users on PlayTracker is aggregated to generate interesting cross-platform data about games and the people that play them, and you can see this data on Insight.

This data processing is carefully crafted to not infringe on user privacy in any way and produces exclusively aggregated results like “Game X sold more than Game Y” or “25% of action gamers also enjoy tactics games”. You can read more about it in our short and to the point privacy notice, which was written to be clear for the average user.

Each graph on Insight features an explanation that is hidden by default and can be revealed by pressing the information icon in the top right of the graph’s card.

How it works

Distilled down to its basics: we count how many people in our sample have a game and then extrapolate that onto the world to estimate total players.

In addition to the data of registered users, PlayTracker also gathers any publicly available data (like number of reviews), combining the two using machine learning to generate dozens of stats and graphs, as well as to estimate sales/player numbers.

This methodology is not too different from political polls around the world, we just applied it to something more impactful and important: videogames.

Because of the nature of user sampling methodology, data on Insight is merely a fine-tuned estimate, and not a guaranteed measurement of reality. Data on Insight also takes a couple of days to reflect real-world changes – meaning if a game launches to an instant 1M players, Insight will instead show a slow rise to 1M over the next several days.

Calibration quiz

To improve the effectiveness of this methodology, we’ve devised a short and fun “Calibration Quiz” with our partner Newzoo. This optional quiz calibrates your "gamer persona" to help us improve the statistical analysis we do to create the data on Insight.

Please take a few minutes to fill it out and help us out.

Free vs Paid

Insight is the main way PlayTracker makes money. While a ton of stats are available for free to everyone, we’ve carefully picked some data that appeals to business professionals doing market research more than a curious gamers, and locked that data behind a subscription.

We feel this is a fair way to keep PlayTracker fully free for gamers and only ask for money from professionals who will use this data to make better business decisions, and thus make their money back.

Menu