Concurrent player numbers on Steam have increasingly become a hot topic of conversation around any new game release, whether it's a multiplayer-focused title or not, in the past few years. The data shared on SteamDB can sometimes be useful, but ultimately, it only shows a small portion of the picture when it comes to how successful or not a game is. Now, however, it seems like PlayStation is looking to insert itself into that conversation, with new SteamDB-like features being tested in the PS5's beta program.
Spotted by YouTuber Mystic, essentially, PlayStation will start listing weekly player counts for popular games and trending games in your country in a new widget for the PS5 Welcome Hub, providing more of an insight into which games are the most popular on the platform. It's not a live, constantly updated count of how many players are in a particular game, but it is more of a consistent insight into which games are drawing the most attention than we've seen before.
The widget's two modes are: Top 10 and Trending Now, with the former showing weekly player numbers and the latter identifying which games have had a surge in popularity. As Mystic points out, that set up likely means the Top 10 games likely won't see a lot of variety, since popular live service games that dominate the platform like Grand Theft Auto V, Fortnite, Call of Duty, and Apex Legends will likely hold their place on that list every week.
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Trending Now, however, will likely feature more variety, as new releases or new content updates for older titles will show up more on that list as players rush to try out the latest and greatest on the platform. One drawback is that the data for both the Top 10 and Trending Now are region-based, so you'll only see what's popular in your country, rather than get a more global picture of what's popular on PlayStation.
Still, in both cases, it'll be good to finally get some insight, directly from PlayStation, as to which games drive the platform. Its region-based tracking may also encourage players to try out games popular in their country, if they're looking for something to play with others and make some friends through their online gaming.
As for the first list revealed by this new feature, as Mystic scrolls through them in his video, we can see that the games with the most players this week, in the US at least, are:
- Fortnite - 14.6M
- GTA V - 5.13M
- Minecraft - 4.97M
- Call of Duty - 4.95M
- Apex Legends - 1.72M
- Marvel Rivals - 1.58M
- Battlefield 6 - 1.51M
- ARC Raiders - 972K
This feature is still just in the Beta Program for PS5 users, so it'll likely be a while before it's rolled out to all users globally. Hopefully, we'll see it arrive sooner than later.
About the author: David has been writing about videogames, technology, and culture since 2020, with a focus on reporting daily news across multiple publications, including GameDaily.Biz, GameSkinny, and PlayStation Universe before joining Wccftech in 2025. David started contributing as Canada/US reporter for Wccftech's gaming section in 2025. Besides being up-to-date on the industry's movements, he loves interviewing developers, reviewing games, and writing intricate essays about the symbolism and layered meanings to be found in rich narratives as he's done for publications like GamesIndustry.Biz, LostInCult, and others. Outside of games he loves movies, music, theatre, his hometown, and his family, though not necessarily in that order.
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