Steam Leak Shows That PUBG Is Not The Most Played Game At The Moment

A Steam leak has shown that the most played game right now isn’t PUBG. In fact, it’s not even second.

According to the list, the top Steam game is Team Fortress 2 with over 50 million players. It’s followed by Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and then (and only then) comes PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds.

Vg247 reports that the first strictly single-player game on the list is Skyrim at 11th place with 13 million players, plus another 4 million with the Special Edition.

Here’s the top 20:

  • Team Fortress 2 – 50,191,347
  • Counter-Strike: Global Offensive – 46,305,966
  • PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS – 36,604,134
  • Unturned – 27,381,399
  • Left 4 Dead 2 – 23,143,723
  • PAYDAY 2 – 18,643,807
  • Garry’s Mod – 18,576,379
  • Warframe – 16,332,217
  • Counter-Strike: Source – 15,001,876
  • Paladins – 14,371,946
  • The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – 13,235,488
  • Terraria – 13,132,545
  • Portal 2 – 13,062,700
  • Sid Meier’s Civilization V – 12,701,498
  • Grand Theft Auto V – 12,604,123
  • Borderlands 2 – 11,218,936
  • Robocraft – 10,145,493
  • Rocket League – 10,110,342
  • Portal – 9,971,481
  • War Thunder – 9,536,732

The leak has already been plugged, but if you’re interested to know exactly how it was done, check out this Medium post where The End Is Night developer Tyler Glaiel explains exactly how he managed to get these figures.

He explains: “The thing that’s interesting about this method is that it returns exact numbers. The old method SteamSpy was using required random sampling of user profiles and extrapolating the data to fit the whole steam audience from that. It was accurate but included some pretty big error bars, especially for games with low numbers of sales.

“The new achievement based method doesn’t have this weakness. There is no random sampling or uncertainty* here, the tool spits out the exact number valve is using to calculate achievement data, and it does it on a snapshot of data instantly instead of requiring collecting data over time. You don’t need a server to use this method, you can just run a simple script and get an answer in seconds.”

Pretty cool, right? Kind of sucks that Valve has already fixed the leak because these numbers are fascinating.

Please note that this list doesn’t contain all games that are found on Steam but does cover almost all of them.