Reporting on the business of online games — what they cost, how they count their players, and who is paying for the free ones.
Fifty games, one list, and a set of rules we are going to hold ourselves to. Here is what the numbers mean and what we refuse to let them mean.
Monthly actives, registered accounts, peak concurrents: four ways to count the same players, and a marketing department picking whichever one flatters.
The most important thing to know about a modern online game is usually not the gameplay. It is the machinery attached to it.
ARC Raiders took Tarkov's tension and removed its cruelty. The result is the most socially interesting shooter in years.
Valorant's lobbies are clean because Riot runs a driver on your machine from the moment it boots. Counter-Strike's are not, because Valve won't. Both positions are defensible. Pick one.
Free-to-play is not automatically predatory. These are the games that prove it, and what they give away is remarkable.
World of Warcraft is 22. Final Fantasy XIV is thriving. EVE Online has outlived three console generations. The genre got smaller and considerably healthier.
Honor of Kings, Mobile Legends and Free Fire have audiences that dwarf most of the PC top ten. They get a fraction of the attention.
Hundreds of millions of players, millions of experiences, and an earnings distribution so steep that the median creator makes effectively nothing.
Rockstar's sequel is the largest scheduled event in the industry's history, and every live-service game on the calendar is planning around it.