A Ubisoft insider has shared that the people at the company have reached out to Valve, asking to limit the visibility of player count data. Concurrent player counts have become a valuable source of information in the gaming industry, especially when so many video games include online community aspects enhanced by their popularity. Despite how important these numbers can be to players, this plan could help Ubisoft in the long term.

In some cases, gamers will use Steam player count data to indicate a video game's success, and the company wants to paint a "more favorable picture to investors" who may otherwise be discouraged. According to the insider, Ubisoft is one of several other companies that have requested Valve hide this information.

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1 hour ago

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Ubisoft wants to hide them, because their new games are soulless and nobody wants to play with them. That's my opinion, it's very childish from them.

1 hour ago
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TBH, those numbers are only important for multiplayer games, and should stay for them.
But I'm sick of idiots saying small indie game X is "dead" because it's been played by 30 people last month. It's a single-player game, you don't need other people to play it beside you, why are you even looking at that stat.

1 hour ago
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Like that one reviewer who keeps saying it over and over... as if wanting to check out a game nobody is playing is a crime.

1 hour ago
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If it's the same reviewer I'm thinking in, using "obsolete pixel art" is the major crime of them all. Worse crime than no screen setup.

I can see him/her by the train station screaming at every passing train "you should be maglev! Retrograde!"

47 minutes ago
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Glad to know I'm not the only one absolutely tired of seeing that cat profile pic whenever I look up reviews of small indie titles, for that dude anything that won't run on HD ultra wide is unworthy of existing and RPG maker games are some sort of sin. I once read one of their reviews where they were gloating about getting to be the first one to review the game so their negative review could do the most harm.

39 minutes ago
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Probably they think they're a hero. Warning people what kind of game are they watching at. RPGMaker, Gamemaker? Rubbish. Pixel art? Caveman painting. 2D? 80's crap. Why does he keep buying the cheapest bundles so he can write a negative review? The problem is that their negative reviews are based in things most people don't agree with so well; problem is that they are actually harming the developer if they're among the first 2-3 reviews.
The only time I find something valuable is that they have become master of asset flips. And still when they're not sure, they suggest it.
Another thing is the boilerplate style. After 5 minutes watching a game, takes five pharagraphs out of a longer doc and pastes it as a "real review", in the same way they accusses devs of pasting things together to form a game. Quite hypocritical they can't write a proper review for each game, they have to get from an asset warehouse. "Review flip"? (I also remember a couple guys a few years ago who only copied the most popular/useful review and paste it as their own. Thankfully they stopped.)
Yet of course he nevers deals with a well reviewed and rated RPGmaker game, or (more thank you think) Gamemaker games. Or pixel art games which have become staples of indie gaming. Binding of Isaac should be forbidden in a modern digital store!
I could respect an opinion but they forcibly punches them as facts, just look at the user name... When someone starts confusing opinions/beliefs with facts, I usually go away from the conversation.
I could go on and on and probably you too, but let's not spend more energy on this, k?

9 minutes ago
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I think in general the more info the consumer has, the better it is. The problem though is that too many people have a lack of functional reading skills. It's genuinely ridiculous how the majority of people citing player counts have basically zero clue how to interpret them.

35 minutes ago
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Its important for all games, every single one.
EA and Ubisoft lied about their sales with Outlaws and Veilguard.
Without this data no one would have investigated further. EA even had an internal investigation into who leaked their poor sales numbers...why? because they got called out on their lies.

Black Myth Wukong (from a small developer) would not even have gotten nominated for any award after the paid smear campaign from IGN for not bowing to Sweet baby, if no one saw how well the game actual did on Steam.

Those idiots saying games are dead because of numbers are never going away, most are paid or have an agenda.

6 minutes ago
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I suspect Gabe had some words for Ubisoft and most of the m were expletives.

1 hour ago
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"Sure, we could make use of these transparent metrics to improve our games and deliver complete games instead of half-assed alpha builds. But we would prefer to keep doing what we're doing and mislead investors into thinking that our games are played by millions of players instead of hundreds. So pretty please, less transparency, more of the same of us!"

1 hour ago
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Hiding anything from shareholders is a crime. For investors only sales numbers matter anyways. No one cares if Ubi is hated, if their games are good or bad. If they sell, it's all good. Also it's only a rumor.... "According to a report ... from an "insider"..." LOL, really?

1 hour ago
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the company wants to paint a "more favorable picture to investors"

the company wants to lie to to investors, isn't this illegal?

1 hour ago
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All (big) companes do that, in a more or less visible way .

Statistics can be interpreted 'dfiferently' if you catch my meaning :p

1 hour ago
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46 minutes ago
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Yep, its a combined effort so they can skew reviews with their paid journalists. Still salty because Wukong sold better than Outlaws and Veilguard combined.
What's next? Ban game reviews altogether? So every release can be a "return to form" and "game of the year"

What they don't understand is word of mouth is always more effective than Steam player count data. If you tell your friends a game is crap for good reason, guess what? most will believe you over some paid reviewer.

20 minutes ago
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They're going the Netflix route. Reviews are bad? Well, then we remove review system entirely. Problem fixed. 🙄

I really hope Vavle tells them to go kick rocks. Having concurrent users shown for every game is extremely friendly to consumers, and one of the reasons Steam is so much better than the competition.

33 minutes ago
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It's one of those things where it's almost mandatory for a big company to be anti-consumer since being public requires to create maximum profits for minimum spenditure. In this set of legal systems the onus is sadly on us to defend our rights as consumers rather than the publicly traded companies to not violate them.

33 minutes ago
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