Just over a year ago, I published a guest article on the sadly retired TheStadia.Life blog doing a quantitative estimate about how many hours Stadia has Streamed for certain games. This was partly inspired by GeForce Now sharing that it had streamed 150M hours of its entire library in the past 12 months.
In this analysis, I used a fairly accurate methodology for measuring how many hours Sniper Elite 4 had been streamed.
Here I will update this analysis using up-to-date leaderboards and player times for several different games. I’ll also compare this to the data from StadiaHunters.com, which has a small-ish (opt-in) dataset of user data. It is important to note that only a subset of StadiaHunters.com have their play time tracked due to Stadia privacy settings.
Use data from the actual leaderboards to accurately estimate the time several games have been streamed on Stadia.
In order to get an accurate estimate of total game play for games on Stadia, it helps to have a game where leaderboard position is very highly correlated with play time. There are a handful of games like this on Stadia:
- Zombie Army 4 (116K players)
- Sniper Elite 4 (233K players)
- Summer Olympic Games (2.8K players)
- The Crew 2 (83K players)
- Monopoly (34K players)
For each of these games, we can create a plot of leaderboard position vs. hours played – though collecting this data was pretty hard work. See the below figures:
We then simply need to estimate the area under the curve (i.e. the integral of the data) to get the total hours played. Keep in mind the above plots are on a log-log scale. Each leaderboard was fit to an inverse polynomial function (the red/yellow lines) and then numerically integrated. The estimated total play times (as of May 2022) for each game are:
- Sniper Elite 4: 1,250,000 Hours
- The Crew 2: 775,000 Hours
- Zombie Army 4: 450,000 Hours
- Monopoly: 145,000 Hours
- Olympic Games: 7,000 Hours
To be fair the fits aren’t super great as the data is very noisy – the r-squared values are around 0.5. Keep in mind these are log plots – so the variation is very high! What is the error bound here? However, when doing sums, you typically benefit from a cancellation of errors (see e.g. central value theorem). A safe way to estimate the error would be to fit curves just below the data and just above. For these, datasets, we are looking at a +/- 1.5X error band for the sum (remember again these are log plots, so relatively small changes in the curve can make a big difference).
Comparison to GamePlay in the StadiaHunters dataset
Stadia Hunters had a community of over 2,200 Stadians (as of May 2022) (that, like the Stadia population, include people who have left the platform and also people who have just joined). Of that group, about half of them have their playtimes publicly available for Stadia Hunters to grab (or did at some point in the past).
What complicates our estimate is that the fraction of players represented by the Stadia Hunters community with public play times varies a lot by game!
| Game | Stadia Hunter Population (as of May 2022) | Total Leaderboard Size (as of May 2022) | Ratio |
| Sniper Elite 4 | 702 | 233,800 | 333 |
| Dirt 5 | 571 | 131,600 | 230 |
| Zombie Army 4 | 634 | 116,300 | 183 |
| The Crew 2 | 770 | 83,700 | 109 |
| Monopoly | 391 | 34,000 | 87 |
| AC Black Flag | 232 | 13,300 | 57 |
| Merek’s Market | 192 | 6,300 | 33 |
| Olympic Games | 308 | 2,810 | 9 |
For your info, Destiny 2 has 1285 Stadia Hunters players with times and Cyberpunk 995 SH Players w/ times (again as of May 20220). There is also an interesting trend, the more popular a game overall, the smaller the fraction of the game’s playerbase the StadiaHunters crowd represents.
It looks like Stadia Hunters players tend to be a lot more likely to play “any” game on the platform. This makes sense for achievement hunters. But, it means they make up a much bigger fraction of the population of the player base for small games – they are 11% of the player-base for Olympic Games!! On the other hand, they make up just 0.3% of Sniper Elite 4 players – and likely even less of Destiny 2 and Cyberpunk 2077.
The Stadia Hunters players do seem to be at least pretty well distributed throughout the leaderboards in many games but not all.
| Stadia Hunters Hours | Ratio | Extrapolated Total Hours | Actual Total Hours (Integrals) | Error | |
| Sniper Elite 4 | 4,095 | 333 | 1,360,000 | 1,250,000 | 9% |
| Zombie Army 4 | 4,006 | 183 | 733,000 | 450,000 | 63% |
| The Crew 2 | 18,350 | 109 | 2,000,000 | 775,000 | 258% |
| Monopoly | 1,950 | 87 | 170,000 | 145,000 | 17% |
| Olympic Games | 771 | 9 | 6,900 | 7,000 | 2% |
The Crew 2 achievement hunters at StadiaHunters appear to have above average play times, though.
You can see how one might attempt to extrapolate from here the total hours on Stadia streamed. But, given the +/- 1.5X errors just in the integrals themselves and possible errors on the order of another 2x-4x more from the extrapolation using Stadia Hunters data (e.g. The Crew 2) it’s a bit dubious.
We also know that Destiny 2 alone has been streamed 10’s of millions of hours on Stadia based on the daily player counts from Charlemagne. Unfortunately, Destiny 2 and a few other top most games, like Cyberpunk 2077, don’t have leaderboards that allow us to pin down the play time more precisely.
So we will leave it here with the following conclusions:
- The five games (Sniper Elite 4, Zombie Army 4, Monopoly, Olympics, The Crew 2) have been Streamed a combined 2.5M +/- 1.5x hours on Stadia. See the individual breakdown above.
- The StadiaHunters crowd represents an increasingly small fraction of the player base of a game the more popular a title is.
