PlayStation Adds Weekly Player Counts and Trending Games to PS5 Welcome Hub Beta

PS5 has been conducting tests on the PlayStation 5 Welcome Hub, which enables users to find out which titles are popular on the console. This update has been made available in the PS5 beta program and includes player count tracking and trending graphs, which seem quite reminiscent of the statistics gamers often find on SteamDB.

Recently, the concurrent player count metric has played an essential role in assessing new video game releases, particularly those with multiplayer modes. The launch of any game on Steam triggers an analysis based on player count, enabling users to determine whether the game is a success, experiencing difficulties, or gaining traction. While these SteamDB metrics can be helpful, they cover only a fraction of the picture because they focus primarily on PC users.

Now, PlayStation appears ready to bring that same type of discussion to console players through a new Welcome Hub widget in beta. 

This feature will include the ranking of games by weekly player count for the most popular games, as well as those that are becoming trending all of a sudden in your region. Rather than displaying the number of players in real time, this feature appears to focus on a game's activity over the course of the week. It includes two separate categories, which are named “Top 10” and “Trending Now”.

As for the former, it displays games with more players during the week, whereas the latter showcases games whose activity has increased recently. The latter will prove to be far more intriguing in the long run due to the possibility of introducing new titles or big releases that were not necessarily part of the Top 10 list, giving way to newer surprises and hits or simply significant improvements to already popular games that might make them trend unexpectedly high in the rankings.

By contrast, the Top 10 list is set to remain largely the same each week, with a few minor fluctuations, due to the continued success of large live-service games on the PlayStation platform, including Fortnite, GTA 5, Call of Duty, and Apex Legends. These existing graphs have clearly shown this. It was reported that Fortnite has about 14.66 million users, making it the largest game on this platform, with a significant lead over its competitors.

The second-largest is GTA 5, with about 5.13 million users, followed by Minecraft, with 4.97 million users. There is also the Call of Duty game with 4.95 million users. Other games in these ranks include Apex Legends, with about 1.72 million users; Marvel Rivals, with about 1.58 million users; Battlefield 6, with 1.51 million users; and ARC Raiders, with 972,000 users.

Looking at the list overall, the biggest takeaway is that nearly every major game pulling these numbers is a live-service title. 

All the titles featured are built on multiplayer gameplay, continuous updates, and sustained engagement. Indeed, there seems to be something about the feature that almost feels like Sony telling its customers why developers are pursuing live-service success, regardless of any criticism their projects may face from time to time. These numbers clearly demonstrate that live service games are by far the most-played titles in the ecosystem.

One downside of the new feature is that all the categories, whether Trending Now or Top 10, depend on regions. This means that the ranking shows what is popular in your specific country, not globally within PlayStation platforms.

Despite this downside, the feature still allows users to obtain much more information about game usage statistics on PlayStation consoles than Sony has allowed in the past. Moreover, it can be seen as the first step to transparency of player engagement within Sony's gaming services.