How We Track Games — Data & Methodology

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GameDropDaily combines public store data, Steam news feeds, and community-maintained redeem-code lists. Use this guide to understand what each number measures, when it was collected, and what our snapshots cannot tell you.

Sources, by platform

Reading Steam's 24-hour peak

A 24-hour concurrent peak is the highest number of players playing at the same time in that reporting window. A peak of 50,000 does not mean only 50,000 different people played that day: players can come and go between measurements. It also does not measure copies sold, all-time owners, or the audience on consoles and other PC stores. Steam distinguishes current players from the peak on its official most-played chart.

Our player-count cards are saved snapshots, not a live counter. We retain the chart rank supplied by Steam rather than calculating it from the displayed peak. The weekly movement compares that rank with Steam's supplied previous-week rank; missing comparison data does not establish that a game is newly released.

Reading mobile charts and install ranges

Our iOS and Android fetchers use the US storefront by default. Compare ranks within the same platform, storefront, and chart type: iOS top-free and top-grossing are separate lists, and neither can be read as a global player count. Ratings and rating counts describe store feedback, not daily active players or downloads.

An Android install label such as 1,000,000+ gives a lower threshold, not an exact count or a daily total. We keep the store's label and use its minimum value for installation-based comparisons; games in the same band may have different actual totals. Google's app statistics guide also treats installed audience, acquisition, and active-user measures as separate metrics. Our public store data does not include a publisher's private analytics.

Snapshot dates and missing ranks

The scheduled refresh runs daily. Collection time, Steam's reporting date, and a game's patch or app-version release date can differ. A historical snapshot's date is the UTC day we saved the available data; if a fetch failed, it can contain an older source snapshot. This guide's update date records an editorial revision, not a data refresh.

We collect a limited section of each chart, and some games are skipped when their store details cannot be loaded. An absent rank can therefore mean a game fell outside our collected range or that data was unavailable. It does not mean zero players, zero downloads, or a delisted game. Missing days and missing values limit trend comparisons; a flat run of snapshots alone cannot establish that activity stayed unchanged.

How the trending lists differ

The trending page creates separate comparisons from the games in our current snapshots: Steam rank changes, iOS ratings among games with more than 1,000 ratings, and Android installation thresholds. These are selected views with different measures, not one combined popularity score or a ranking of every game in each store.

Rules we hold ourselves to

Read more about GameDropDaily, or return to the PC chart, iOS chart, or Android chart.