For PlayStation 4 owners the big news story currently is about a new tool which Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) has launched called ‘My PS4 Life‘. SIE create personalised videos for each gamer, showing how many hours they’ve dumped into certain titles, how many and what trophies they’ve achieved, and most interestingly how many players have achieved a certain trophy. Why has this sparked an interest? Well, some clever soul has worked out that these figures can be used to determine player counts of PlayStation 4 videogames, figures that SIE and developers don’t always want to share.
First spotted by a user on Reddit – isn’t it always the way – these new videos can be a window into the hidden world of player stats, giving what looks like fairly accurate stats on how many people are playing a certain title. It works by each video disclosing the exact number of players who received a trophy. Combine that figure with the percentage of people who obtained the trophy and you have a reasonable player count figure.
Explaining how it works in greater detail the post states: “Here, 33,764 players earned the “Photo Bomber” trophy in Fallout 76. And on playstation.com it’s revealed that 8,3% of all players got this trophy. Simple math: the total number of people who have played Fallout 76 on PS4 = 33,764 * 100% / 8,3% = 406,795.”
Currently, Reddit user gamstat has a website dedicated to the figures, so you can scroll through and have a look. There is a small cravat that the figures have been taken from a specific time window; 20th November to 4th December 2018 approximately, so any really new games launched won’t be included.
At present, the list only features one dedicated PlayStation VR title and that is Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality, which only has figures for Europe and Australia totalling 38,400. When it comes to titles such as Resident Evil 7 which do feature PlayStation VR support there’s no way to tell what percentage actually use the HMD. If more dedicated VR titles are added to the list then it might give a better idea of how many headset users are buying videogames and the size of the PlayStation VR market.
As the website is updated with new figures, VRFocus will keep you updated.
via Mint VR