PlayStation is taking a cue from Steam and testing a new feature that allows players to see player counts for PS5 games each week. Since these statistics drive talk of toxic games, and discoverability on the PlayStation Store is already difficult, this feature could do more harm than good.
First discovered by YouTuber Mystic and reported by Destructoid, PlayStation is beta testing a new “Community Activity” widget for the PS5’s Welcome Hub. Players can select “Top 10” on this widget to see the week’s most popular games, ranked by number of players. Meanwhile, the “Trending Now” option will show other games that are surging in popularity, either due to increased hours played or number of games played.
While it’s somewhat exciting to have more direct access to game-specific player data on PS5, I worry that the numbers displayed on this new Community Activity widget will be bad in more ways than one. I’ve seen the problems it causes with Steam games.
Over the past few years, the relevance of player count statistics in gaming discourse has increased on social media and the rest of the internet. Every time a new game comes out, you’ll see a lot of discussion on X or Reddit about how well the game will perform on SteamDB. The problem is that the number of players does not directly correlate with quality; they show popularity. Multiplayer games, in particular, often have those statistics compared, and players quickly assume the games are similar Burning place or Marathon bad or failure when the numbers fail to match the most popular games.
Sony’s PlayStation Store has been testing dynamic pricing on games
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Great new games aren’t guaranteed to top those charts, and they don’t have to be at the top to be considered good. While it may be satisfying to know that your favorite game is loved by many others, you don’t need to have that data to justify why you enjoy it. By increasing the number of players like this, PlayStation will provide the worst encouragement to a generation of gamers who care more about playing popular games than anything else.
In general, console games are free from the player count concerns that PC games face; this will change that. I shudder to think about the social media discourse that would emerge if a game was like that Marathon or Marvel’s Wolverine not appearing in the Top 10 widget when players think they should.
Additionally, this will exacerbate PlayStation Store discoverability issues. I suspect the Community Activity widget will continue to direct players to the most popular and well-known games, not new games that PS5 users might like. The “Trending Now” widget is a bit more interesting in this regard, but the statistics it tracks seem to favor multiplayer games over single-player games. I’d rather see improvements to PlayStation Store curation than this new feature.
There’s no indication yet when the Community Activity widget will be released widely. PlayStation should think long and hard before taking this feature out of beta, as it will make some already undesirable parts of the game worse on the PS5.
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