This isn’t the only new feature coming to the PlayStation 5 Welcome Hub. It also shows how popular games are in demand.
In recent years, the number of concurrent players registered on Steam has been a frequent topic of discussion whenever a new game is released, regardless of whether the game emphasizes multiplayer mode. While data shared on SteamDB can be useful, it ultimately only shows a small part of the full picture of a game’s success. Now, however, it seems that PlayStation wants to join in on this, as they are testing features similar to SteamDB in the PlayStation 5 beta program.
PlayStation will publish weekly player counts for popular and trending games in a new widget on the Welcome Hub, providing insight into the most popular games on the platform. It won’t be a live, constantly updated count of how many players are in a given game. Rather, it will be a consistent look at which games are attracting the most attention.
The widget has two modes: Top 10 and Trending Now. The former displays weekly player counts, and the latter shows which games have seen a surge in popularity. The Top 10 list will likely remain consistent, as popular live-service games – such as Grand Theft Auto V, Fortnite, Call of Duty, and Apex Legends – will likely retain their spots every week.
The Trending Now list, on the other hand, will likely be more varied. New games or new content updates for older titles will appear on this list more frequently since players are eager to try the latest games on the platform. One drawback is that the data for both lists is region-based, so we can only see what’s popular in our country instead of getting a global view of what’s popular on PlayStation.
In both cases, it would be great to finally receive insight directly from PlayStation into which games are popular on the platform. Region-based tracking may encourage players to try games popular in their country if they’re looking to play with others and make friends through online gaming. The first list published by the new feature shows that the games with the most players in the United States this week are: Fortnite (14.6 million players), Grand Theft Auto V (5.13 million), Minecraft (4.97 million), Call of Duty (4.95 million), Apex Legends (1.72 million), Marvel Rivals (1.58 million), Battlefield 6 (1.51 million), and Arc Raiders (972,000).
This feature is currently only available to a select group of PlayStation 5 users, so it will likely be a while before it becomes available to all users globally.
Source: WCCFTech
