It's all a guesstimate really ... Some folk don't do inara or epic or steam . Some maybe playing legacy and EDO .
Only Fdev know the numbers and they ain't telling . But the numbers for Elite have always been steady so not doomed .
Only Fdev know the numbers and they ain't telling . But the numbers for Elite have always been steady so not doomed .
In my regular player group, off the top of my head, we have:
XBox: 4
Steam: 2
Frontier Launcher: 5
Final message from me about this: you are clearly not familiar with how visual processing works neurologically. That is fine. But please then drop any such arguments. You don't know what you are talking about. You don't understand the research you vaguely remember, and don't grasp why it's not relevant here. Just forget about it.
Well, this the second time in the recent few days somebody is mentioning Inara as a reference in regard of the total player base, so I need to react to some misconceptions that appeared on the forum recently. Although I can be flattered by having such authority, the conclusions are simply based on a pure speculation.
Although Inara is covering quite a good portion of the player base (certainly much more than 5-10% I've see here recently, no idea where that number came from), any public output of Inara cannot be used to derive real player population any way. Very likely not even trends, because any numbers that may be open to interpretation like the Thargoid war participant numbers are very inaccurate for that usage (for example because an interest in the TW may come and go without any user/player activity change, it can even be entirely opposite). So it's very misleading to use similar public numbers in a relation to the entire player population and it's better to not base any estimates on that.
Neurology I only did some passing modules that had overlap, yes. Primarily focused on nerve structure and function, and how it all interacts with biochemistry, endocrinology, molecular biology, and the like. Meanwhile most of my work on the eye itself was actually focused on gene therapy for photoreceptor replacement in dry macular degeneration.
When it comes to the details of how efficiently the brain processes the input from those cells, there I defer to what I can find on pubmed from actual neurologists.
It would probably have helped if you had taken a moment to summarise why the facts we know about how outdated ideas about perception are wrong are not relevant to commonly trotted out falsehoods about upper limits of human perception that are straight up contradicted by literally the evidence of people's own eyes.
Like yes, obviously it's reductive to look at one aspect of this when we can certainly provably distinguish artifacts and flicker presented to us at far higher rates than we can make out distinct image details, so yes, naturally there's still a benefit to ever-increasing monitor refresh and the framerates we're outputting. (FPS players who play games with a motion tracker in the minimap, for example, are going to notice it more, due to their constant saccades maintaining their spatial awareness) And as I said, subjectively of course, people who don't know what to look for aren't going to fully register that there's something they are missing and will be perfectly fine with whatever framerate they are used to.
Our eyesight doesn't operate on the same principles as the technologies we use for image generation, so it's all a matter of finding the best compromises we can for making something look comfortable for the widest range of people, and there's probably never going to be an entirely flawless display technology. Hell, even our eyes are making the best of what they had to work with. Point to the cephalopods on getting their retina in the right place.
Anyway, this is off topic for actually discussing the two modes which is why I had gone back to the talk of Live, Legacy, and the impacts as regards Consoles, etc.
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That's a pretty decent sample. Especially when combined with the other public sources, such as EDSM/EDDN, etc.
You missed the point that no Inara's public number can be at least partially and reliably(!) used for the deduction of the real active player base, for the reasons I have mentioned. Unless you know the active daily/weekly/etc. users and visitors numbers, which... well, aren't displayed.
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I do wish there was some reliable way to get info on console player counts. For any game, not just ED. There's a degree of such info you could probably if you put the time in collate from stuff like the same datasets the various achievement tracker sites use, as that taps into player activity, but there it's still a pretty self selecting portion of the playerbase that skews a particular way when it comes to how they approach games, much as with certain ED tools players use on PC.
![Afterglow [SecB]](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/38/38904.jpg?1753438328){kind=avatar}
Well I want to see those from figures, but if so, that's more reassuring
Elite Dangerous - 2025 Server Population & Player Count - MMO Populations
Elite Dangerous player count, server population, subscribers and game activity stats, updated daily in 2025 (aka EliteDangerous).
mmo-population.com
I find it VERY hard to believe a niche game like ED would have higher total all time player counts than Guild Wars 2. Even the proliferation of alt accounts cannot be that high. I'd like to see how they got to those numbers.Elite Dangerous - 2025 Server Population & Player Count - MMO Populations
Elite Dangerous player count, server population, subscribers and game activity stats, updated daily in 2025 (aka EliteDangerous).
The placement is more likely to be based on the games sold and not on the active players. But what do I know...
Edit: Elite Dangerous is estimated to have 168,816 players per day this month.
Guild Wars 2 is estimated to have 501,807 players per day this month.
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As I said, their list of all-time counts, as in units sold, not active players.
Naturally WoW tops that list because of course it does, it's been out two decades and continually strong.
I'd expect GW2 to be an order of magnitude higher then ED there on total sales, even accounting for it being a fiver on consoles for practically the last five years. They're both buy to play business models, but one is way more accessible and appealing to vastly more players. Even with people buying several accounts (which also happens frequently on GW2 and would inflate those numbers even more since many people buy a second or third GW2 account just for the gold value of the daily login rewards).
I do wonder if the way they are estimating numbers is skewed by similar factors to what we see in the way many games suddenly acquire a whole bunch of rare achievements on xbox when the game goes onto gamepass, due to so many people installing it but only a handful of those playing it past the initial tutorial. There's loads of ways to work backwards to get how many players on a subscription service are likely to have installed and played a given game on that service for example, to try and estimate how many have created accounts in the absence of such data from the game's publisher, but at the end of the day they are clearly going to be basing literally any estimate of total player counts for any given game heavily on guesswork since they can't even get the same data from one game to another.
(I hadn't even considered the fact that various platforms have monthly giveaways like on the Epic Store, or XBox's games With Gold, what happens when one of these games is included there? What percentage of the total users of that service do you increase your estimate of all time user accounts by? For that matter, how do you account for consoles allowing for multiple user accounts on the same game licence? So many factors each adding more margin for error.)
Naturally WoW tops that list because of course it does, it's been out two decades and continually strong.
I'd expect GW2 to be an order of magnitude higher then ED there on total sales, even accounting for it being a fiver on consoles for practically the last five years. They're both buy to play business models, but one is way more accessible and appealing to vastly more players. Even with people buying several accounts (which also happens frequently on GW2 and would inflate those numbers even more since many people buy a second or third GW2 account just for the gold value of the daily login rewards).
I do wonder if the way they are estimating numbers is skewed by similar factors to what we see in the way many games suddenly acquire a whole bunch of rare achievements on xbox when the game goes onto gamepass, due to so many people installing it but only a handful of those playing it past the initial tutorial. There's loads of ways to work backwards to get how many players on a subscription service are likely to have installed and played a given game on that service for example, to try and estimate how many have created accounts in the absence of such data from the game's publisher, but at the end of the day they are clearly going to be basing literally any estimate of total player counts for any given game heavily on guesswork since they can't even get the same data from one game to another.
(I hadn't even considered the fact that various platforms have monthly giveaways like on the Epic Store, or XBox's games With Gold, what happens when one of these games is included there? What percentage of the total users of that service do you increase your estimate of all time user accounts by? For that matter, how do you account for consoles allowing for multiple user accounts on the same game licence? So many factors each adding more margin for error.)
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I do sometimes wonder what gaming would have looked like when it first came along, had Baird got his way and the UK adopted the 1000-line, colour format he demoed in 1942 as the national TV standard after WWII
NTSC - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Space Engineers just announced their new Playstation release, which completely took me by surprise. They are also introducing a new AI system that will allow for complex AI without using scripting, which also opens up a lot of possibilities on console. So yeah, it seems like Keen is on top of the console market.
As an update on that tangent, it looks like CDPR's DX12 port for the Witcher III is so bad as far as threadedness and CPU limitations go that people are suggesting it's been deliberately sabotaged to show off DLSS 3.
Because CDPR have never simply cocked up a release before XD
Deliberately sabotaged to show off RTX. HBAO+ has been removed from the dx11 version and the DX12 non rt version. Its easy to conclude that the comparison shots were not different enough between hbao+ and rt that some sort of marketing would fail. 1.31 is just fine.