Factorio Forums

This is a question at developers / staff: Can and do you want to provide some stats about how many players are
playing the game?

On the factorio.com frontpage is a counter for total downloads (67818 when I checked just now) but that doesn't
really tell me how many people are actually playing.

Since the game doesn't require a connection for single player (btw, thank you for that) you probably don't have
exact stats. But it'd be interesting how many people download the update packages? And maybe there are some
other interesting stats that I'm currently not aware of.

I'm just asking. If you're reluctant to publish that data I absolutely understand.

Actually, that's numbers of sold copies not the amount of times the game was downloaded. Given that it's not on steam and it's not dirt-cheap it is unlikely that people paid money for the nice looks of icon.
And since the game doesn't necessarily connect to server on start up I doubt you can get any more accurate measure of amount of players.

Well, there's also this bar at the bottom of main forum page.

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but let's be honest, the game is not dwarf fortress, there's not much to actually discuss about it. (It has also been ten times less in development)
For a comparison, the witcher official forum:

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And the aforementioned df

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