What is up with the Unturned player stats?

Unturned U3 Discussion
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I think many people already know that Unturned probably doesn’t actually have a 50k players average.
I am confused of where this number is coming from due to around 4.5k peak players on at once currently throughout the day.

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Also low chance these are bots due to skin drops being removed, removing almost any benefit of have bots.

You can argue that these massive amount of players only play single player. Which won’t really make sense because most people who play just single player are probably offline so they won’t count as players. Also would be very strange if there was 10X players playing single player over servers.

I have realized randomly a HUGE amount of total players go offline like in this example.

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Btw not to be rude but there is more servers than the average player count currently.
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I personally think there is around 8k average real players currently.

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its not surprising AT ALL a TON of children download free games and are generally more into downloading lots of mods

doing this would also lock them to single player

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These are the most subscribed mods which are mainly ran by servers.

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This brings up a really valid point. Also, there being 35k unique players literally makes some things like the 50k player average quite literally impossible. The numbers seem skewed.

Personally, I found roughly 1000 players when I examined the entirety of one of Unturned’s handful of major genres within servers, RP. 50,000 players within the community, yet one of the most open and played genres of servers can only bag 1000 on a good day? It doesn’t seem to make much sense imo. I found the RP player stats number by searching through every single RP server (did a few refreshes to check if anything was missing) and noting the playercount of each server at a time when I saw most servers averaging a really high player-count, then added them all up.

Seeing how consistent criticism is handled, there’s a chance that this thread could be shut down, so I wish you luck.

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This is actually a very major issue because people actually think unturned really has this many players and start hosting servers thinking that they will get a decent amount of players. This is also probably why unturned YouTube is very dead. And why people say unturned isn’t a dying game because they are basing this information on a super misleading stat.

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All of your points are correct. The actual population is laughably low. And yes, this thread certainly will get closed as soon as there is even a miniscule reason that could be used for it.

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This is my second time using this forum. I don’t know how things go around here but this doesn’t sound like a good place. The only thing I am mad about is that this FAKE player stats has been going on for years and still isn’t resolved. And the sad thing is that Nelson knows about this and still there’s no fix. At this point it seems like something is being faked for the benefit of Unturned. I wont point any hands because I truly don’t know if this is a error or deception. But still this should have been fixed years ago.

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Disabling the playtime item drops was part of us attempting to see if there were bots idling the game (and curb their presence, if there were). It’s been mentioned a few times, but there’s a (very short) support article about it.

We don’t collect that much information about players for us to outright know “X number of players exclusively play single-player”, or “Y% of players spend most of their time in the main menu and might be bots”.

The “50k average” that gets commonly-discussed when people discuss player counts comes from the stats reported on websites like SteamCharts, SteamDB, etc. that visualize info available from the Steam API. From my understanding, the API call they use is not affected by a player’s privacy settings (Steam profiles are private by default), and they just report the exact number returned by the Steam API.

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Have you guys got into contact with steam trying to solve this issue? Or add something that fully disables idling? It doesn’t look like it, other than the skins drops which didn’t do anything. You guys should put more offer into fixing this.

From my understanding, the API call they use is not affected by a player’s privacy settings (Steam profiles are private by default), and they just report the exact number returned by the Steam API.

Doesn’t this mean the server player count is using the same thing?

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We can’t fully disable people from potentially going AFK on the main menu / leaving the game open in single-player – that’s not a realistic suggestion.

They most likely don’t use the same Steam API call as other websites if they’re returning different information. I’m unsure what service you’re using instead, but they probably have information somewhere about how they get their own information and why it may be different.

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If you look at the player counts of the servers in game it looks like what it says on Unturned Stats - BattleMetrics. There is no arguing about unturned actually having 50k players it just simply doesn’t. Also have you contacted steam? Do you really think there is more afk/single players than server players 10X?

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Yes, you are right. This place is more like an echo-chamber, as the amount of people using this forum is very low. Most of the regulars here either don’t react to serious posts like this thread at all, or when they do, they consider themselves to be top comedians. You might think you can come here to ask for a change… well, it works, but very very rarely. Most of the time you get ignored. Most of the stuff is being decided elswhere and in private…

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I made this post for 2 reasons to let people know unturned has fake player stats and to ask for a change/fix due to this being super major issue. And all I see is Nelson just walking right over it. This is honestly very sad to see.

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Is there an issue from reporting a much higher number of active players?

I’d assume many other games have a similar problem but I don’t see any harm from it in this case. Unlike a game you would have to pay for, there isn’t any downside if you look into playing Unturned and then realize there aren’t many servers to play on.

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Yes this is a major issue people think unturned has 10x players then it actually does. First reason is people start hosting for unturned expecting these many players. Second reason is that YouTubers make videos and think they are making content for super popular game with a thriving community. Third reason this is pure false information I and many other people would like to know the real stats of unturned. Also you can’t even tell if the game is dying if the stats are fake. So when people argue that unturned is a alive game they base it off this 50k players when unturned prob has 8k players max.

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There is almost more servers than server players. But I think you meant to say players.

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I mean servers with an active playerbase.

Hosting servers for a nonexistent playerbase would be an issue, but I don’t think the YouTuber part would necessarily be a bad thing. More videos would potentially mean you can bring people back if those channels don’t mind taking a risk on unpopular videos.

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Does the server count and the server player count include the servers that aren’t publicly hosted, but rather privately among friends? If not, then I’d assume that’s where quite a lot of people are, since many people, myself included, play in such servers. I find it very unlikely that the amount of people who play on public servers are all there is to it, given that Unturned (initial steam release being around 2014) still gets quite a few reviews on the steam page: 3,2k recent reviews compared to 522k total reviews. For reference;

Rust (initial release date being 2013) has 8,7k recent reviews compared to 787k total reviews, and it has double the playerbase of Unturned right now, not being free to play.

ARK: Survival Evolved (initial release date being 2015) has 3,9k recent reviews, with 495k total reviews to show for, once again not being free to play. And it has a similarly active playerbase to Unturned.

So I find it pretty unlikely that the amount of players in public servers are all there is to it, the comparison I’ve made may seem unfair given Unturned is a free to play game, but I’ve always thought that free to play games tend to get reviewed less by people that play it, whether it may be because of inactivated accounts, or because it’s simply free to play and you’re not really paying any money for it.

Of course there’s no denying that the player count is probably higher than it actually is in some way or form, but I do not think it’s that high to be a major problem

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When I am home I will look into the review thing later. but I do think it counts servers that are not public or with a password because they to are shown in the server list unless it’s a lan server which I don’t think many people use.

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It is baffling as to why anyone would idle Unturned at this point. Personally, I suspect CS:GO and TF2’s player counts are significantly inflated by idling as well, and I think that might be part of why TF2 is lower priority for Valve. I don’t think idling is a high priority for Valve, and if I did contact Valve asking about this I wouldn’t expect them to make it a priority - Unturned is small potatoes for Steam - you have to scroll down pages and pages before finding it in the top sellers list. I’ve asked them about things that would actually benefit Unturned players in the past like inspecting items in-game, preventing duplicates in mystery boxes, and guaranteed mythical drop rates, but without a response.

I’ve been keeping my own records of the server list for the past ~10 months or so and it does line up with Battlemetrics. Maybe I can see about making a tool to export a csv of the stats.

These are the most subscribed mods which are mainly ran by servers.

Note that the Most Subscribed tab is somewhat unhelpful because the top items were automatically subscribed for all players, and the slightly lower ones are much older files subscribed to by players that have likely left the game (e.g. FIFFS Objects is ancient).

Seeing how consistent criticism is handled, there’s a chance that this thread could be shut down, so I wish you luck.

And yes, this thread certainly will get closed as soon as there is even a miniscule reason that could be used for it.

I’m not sure where this comes from, as I’m always open to constructive criticism. I know that some conspiracy-theory type threads have been closed in the past.

Molt’s comments are correct. And FWIW, no, I’m not botting Unturned to boost the player counts. If I wanted to artifically boost Unturned’s player counts I would have kept item drops and made them more valuable. Heck, I could have made a 0.001% chance of mythical playtime drops and got even more bots!

From SDG’s point of view it would have been a better business decision to keep playtime drops. The game reached 100k+ potentially players before steeply dropping after I removed them.

Anecdotally, a lot of emails I receive from younger players mention that they only played singleplayer for years. I’ve heard this repeated in interviews on the Unturned Podcast as well. My guess is it’s relatively common for players to enjoy playing with mods casually offline.

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