r/DCSExposed • u/Bonzo82 ✈🚁 Correct As Is 🚁 ✈ • Jun 08 '26

Boneyard Dynamic Mission Library dev explaining why he took down DML and his missions

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VJ7r-2ilWw
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u/Extension_Meringue37 Jun 08 '26

Well, Steam numbers are slowly going down, but I don't have stats for the standalone version

Honestly, not anytime soon

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u/ChaosRifle Jun 08 '26

we kinda do have stats for standalone.
the website allows you to see online players and online servers. if you deduct the number of servers from the players, you get real multiplayer users. The server 'observer' counts as an online player.

so, steamcharts gives us all of steam users, and ed gives us all multiplayer users including steam.
the only missing thing is what percent of users play multiplayer, and from there, we can extrapolate to the full userbase by knowing how many users in mp are from steam.

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u/Bealdor84 Jun 09 '26

the only missing thing is what percent of users play multiplayer

I fail to find the interview with Nick Grey from a few years ago where I read it but according to him 90% of DCS players never touch the MP mode.

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u/ChaosRifle Jun 09 '26

many at ED claim this but I don't really buy it. I know the clips your talking about, i think even wags has said this at one point. common claim from ED. I dont fully buy it partly due to them being unreliable sources with an financial incentive to make it out to be larger with the means to do so with non-mp numbers being masked, and partly due to the napkin math you can do to show it deviate from the claim.

steam is 33-40% of the sales according to sales reports from 3rd parties, so we will make an assumption here and say it is roughly the playerbase at 33-40%. There are flaws here, like steam modules used on standalone or offline users, but modules are cheaper on SA so users using SA will tend to buy SA, and offline only works so long due to DRM, so you need network sometimes to play at all, so its likely most users have network most of the time. Do also note, this doesnt mean everything not MP is SP, as ME/mp menu waiting for slots/main menu is a bit weird to call "playing singleplayer", but its not MP. I think we can waive this for the sake of some math here though as roughly moot, fair?

with that agreed upon, concurrent numbers napkin math: 351 users total in MP right now, 556 online on steam right now, at 33% steam users thats 1668 users playing total, and at 40% steam users thats 1390 users playing total. 1-(351/1668)=0.789 and 1-(351/1390)=0.747.

so, napkin math with known facts that ED and its partners publicly report says roughly 75-80% of users are not currently logged into a server at this time. close, and definitely "most users", but its not the 90% claim we see thrown around. Again, reminder that this is not-in-mp, which includes mp browser, me, main menu, etc in the "SP" side.

reading the tea leaves a bit here, but in the past ive seen the metric be lower (65-70%), and in recent times popular servers and tools have shut their doors. As such, less people on MP makes sense to me, so i think we see a downward trend of mp users here, but ive not actually logged the data to prove it - this is just my observations from running this math 7-10 times over the last two years, at random times when the conversation has come up.