I'm so torn on this. On one hand it could hurt a dev or publisher who is publicly traded but on the other hand it is extremely consumer friendly. For all the hurt it could do it also is immensely powerful for indies and allows them to be propelled into the main stream. 

I have a bit of bias leaning towards yes because I have an overwhelming need to know but I wanted to gauge sentiment? Good thing or a bad thing overall?

Aren’t all the Steam player numbers just scraped? It doesn’t come from Valve itself. They’ve definitely changed things in the past to make it harder to estimate sales numbers from Steam.

“The bug three” lol. (also, yeah. I see no reason why not…🤷‍♂️)

Nope. Steam charts might be third party but Steam charts overview is their official page on the store for this. Shows top selling, top played and concurrent players. 

I'ma leave that typo in, it fits 9th gen so perfectly. 

Absolutely. The former is useful for general consumers and the latter is really nice data for nerds like us. It would cause the stupid fanboys in places like Twitter to constantly point out when a big game has a higher player count on their preferred platform but those people can just be ignored.

Online console warring has ruined the excitement of seeing player counts on Steam. It was cool for a long time to see numbers for your favorite game, but it's now gotten to the point where if a game doesn't reach an "X" number of concurrent players on Steam, people take that and run with it online declaring the game a failure even if the game is fully multiplat.

User-written reviews would be nice for sure, though. But the last thing the gaming community needs is more ammo to fuel their console warring lol

Hell, fucking Digital Foundry is used for online console warring with "my version of the game is better than yours" the gaming community has proven time and time again how childish they can be. So the less info they have at their disposal, the better.

I'm guessing you're not a Steam user lol. That information is publicly available on Steam itself.

Yes

I use Steam everyday and I don’t even know how to access this information inside the App, even when looking for it. I had to google and find a direct link to the page that re-directed me to in the app. I still got no idea how you even get to that page naturally. I only get Steam numbers from SteamDB.