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Ka-pi96 said:

spemanig said:

DonFerrari said:

Please tell me how do you track numbers that are exclusive to one source and devs may get solely their numbers without doing anything illegal, I'm really curious.

If I knew, I'd be selling the information. It's not up to me to find out, but Steamspy or whatever proves that it's doable.

It's kind of different though. They just scan steam users libraries and add up the amount of people with each game. It might be possible to do the same with PSN/XBL but obviously those would include physical games too so it would just give you total owners, not specifically digital. And then with used games or people sharing games the total owners would also be higher, much higher in some cases, than the actual number sold. Physical sales are negligible at best on PC and used games don't really exist so it doesn't throw the numbers out by as much there.

Trophy/achievement tracking sites have proved it is possible to scan PSN/XBL accounts, but like I said the ownership numbers from those are going to be significantly less accurate than those from steam.

Indeed, these things tell you how many people have played the game, not how many people purchased the game. There's not just game sharing, but there's multiple accounts on a single console playing the same game.