PlayStation is taking cues from Steam and testing a new feature that will let players see player counts for PS5 games every week. As that statistic drives toxic gaming discourse, and discoverability on the PlayStation Store is already rough, this feature could do more harm than good.
First spotted by the YouTuber Mystic and reported on by Destructoid, PlayStation is beta testing a new “Community Activity” widget for PS5’s Welcome Hub. Players can choose “Top 10” on this widget to see the week’s most popular games, ranked by player count. Meanwhile, the “Trending Now” option will show other games that are surging in popularity, whether that be because of an increase in gameplay hours or the number of matches played.
Although it’s somewhat exciting to have more direct access to game-specific player data on PS5, I’m afraid that the numbers this new Community Activity widget will show will be damaging in many ways. I’ve already seen the problems it has caused for Steam games.
Over the past several years, the relevance of player count statistics in gaming discourse has risen on social and other corners of the internet. Whenever a new game comes out, you can expect to see a lot of discussion on X or Reddit regarding how well the game is doing on SteamDB. The problem is that player counts don’t directly correlate to quality; they indicate popularity. Multiplayer games, in particular, often have that stat compared, and players are quick to deem games like Kiln or Marathon bad or failures when their numbers fail to rival those of the most popular games.
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Amazing new games aren’t guaranteed to top those charts, and they should not have to do so in order to be considered good. While it can be satisfying to know that your favorite game is beloved by many others, you shouldn’t need to have that data to justify why you enjoy it. By elevating player counts like this, PlayStation will be feeding the worst impulses of a generation of gamers who care more about playing what’s popular than anything else.
For the most part, console games are free from the player count discourse that PC games face; this will change that. I shudder to think of the social media discourse that will emerge if a game like Marathon or Marvel’s Wolverine doesn’t show up in the Top 10 widget when players think they should.
Additionally, this will worsen the PlayStation Store’s discoverability problem. I suspect that the Community Activity widget will keep funneling players into the most popular and well-known games rather than new ones that a PS5 user may like. The “Trending Now” widget is somewhat more intriguing in that regard, but the statistics it tracks seem to favor multiplayer games over single-player ones. I’d rather see improvements made to PlayStation Store curation than this new feature.
No indication as to when the wide release of the Community Activity widget will happen has been given. PlayStation should really think long and hard before bringing the feature out of beta, as it will exacerbate some already undesirable parts of gaming on PS5.