Playing right now
A platform-reported concurrent count at a specific moment. Steam is the main public source. It excludes players disconnected from Steam and says nothing about other storefronts.
Read the signal correctly
Methodology before magnitude.
“Players” can mean people online this second, a peak within ten minutes, unique accounts in a week, or an estimate from a sample. GamePulse preserves those differences.
Highest in a window
The maximum concurrency during a stated period. Fortnite's public API uses windowed peak CCU, so it is not compared directly with an instantaneous Steam sample.
Modeled audience
A third party's estimate based on samples or custom sources. The provider and confidence badge stay attached; estimates are never silently promoted to official counts.
Relative position
A platform chart position without a published count. Rank movement is useful evidence of momentum, but rank 1 does not disclose how many people are playing.
GamePulse score
How “Hype right now” works
GamePulse first calculates percentage change between a signal's two latest samples, reverses the sign for rank so an improvement is positive, and normalizes that movement per hour. The score is 50 + 35 × tanh(velocity ÷ 25), capped from 0–100 and calculated only within the same game, platform, source, and metric.
That makes the score a momentum indicator—not an audience estimate. A small game can be moving quickly while a much larger game remains steady.
Cross-platform limits
Crossplay is not deduplication
Crossplay tells you that players on different systems may share matches. It does not reveal whether the same person played on multiple platforms. GamePulse therefore shows platform slices separately and does not add them into a supposedly exact global total.
Source policy
Official, third-party, and unavailable
- High confidence: official value or official rank, represented with its published coverage.
- Medium confidence: documented third-party measurement with a stable methodology.
- Low confidence: estimate whose upstream inputs vary or cannot be independently verified.
Xbox publishes a most-played chart but no global title CCU. PlayStation weekly activity is entered from reviewed public snapshots because Sony provides no supported API. Nintendo, Riot, and Battle.net remain estimated or unavailable until a lawful documented source is configured.