One of my favorite games ever just got a healthy boost of new players. Rocket League joined the 100+ games on Xbox Game Pass in July. A look at the ‘Most Played’ section on Microsoft’s website shows its effect.
Rocket League is sitting at #6 on the list, one spot ahead of PUBG. Here’s how the top 10 shakes out as of today.
Fortnite
GTA V
Rainbow Six Siege
ROBLOX
NBA 2K18
Rocket League
PUBG
Call of Duty: WWII
ARK: Survival Evolved
Destiny 2
The last time I wrote about Xbox’s most played games (late 2017), Rocket League was sitting at #12.
We know games launching on Xbox Game Pass also helps retail sales. We saw it with Sea of Thieves when it was the second best-selling game of March according to NPD. And again with State of Decay 2 when it was May’s best selling game. As for Rocket League? It sits at the top of the ‘top paid games’ list on Microsoft’s website. It did recently have a sale, but being on Xbox Game Pass does appear to have helped it too.
Ok, but what does #6 mean as far as the actual number of players goes.
Unlike most games, Rocket League does include the number of people currently online. I checked it around 1 pm EST, and the number on Xbox One was just below 117,000. Now, I believe Rocket League includes cross-platform numbers here. On the Steam version, the number of players was at 180,000 at the same time. I tried toggling the ‘cross-platform play’ function on and off, but the number stayed the same on both platforms.
We also know the percentage of active users by platform thanks to a recent infographic celebrating the game’s third birthday.
So, how many are playing on Xbox One right now? We can take that 117,000 and subtract about 50,000 playing on PC right now (via Steam’s own stats page). That leaves us with about 67,000 minus some Nintendo Switch players. And this is all well before peak hours since Xbox is most popular in the U.S.
It also gives us a small glimpse into how popular all the games ahead of Rocket League are. The player numbers Fortnite is pulling in have to be absurd.
As for all the games on Xbox’s ‘most played games’ list? There are healthy populations for pretty much all of them. We’ll never know how many players are on most of them, but we can get a good range for many of them thanks to Battlefield.
Battlefield 1 sits at #20 on the list. Seems far down the list, but BF1stats puts the current number of Xbox One players online at 17,063 with a peak 24 hour total of 25,595 concurrent users.
Battlefield 4 sits at #35 with 7,503 players online right now and a 24-hour peak of 11,881 according to BF4stats.
We even have a general idea of a base thanks to the first Star Wars Battlefront game. It doesn’t appear on the ‘most played’ list, but SWBstats shows 2,923 Xbox One players right now with a 24-hour peak of 3,392 players. So even the first Destiny (#49) still has at least a few thousand players on it at any given time.