Is MMO-Population.com Accurate? Not At All.

The website MMO-Population.com purports to rank the top 20 of the most popular MMO Games by active players and total population on a daily basis. The problem is their data is so wildly inaccurate that their daily rankings are totally useless. The relative rankings and the active player figures are not at all accurate.

They claim that New World has 987.99K active players today (December 3, 2021), but a quick look at Steam Charts shows that New World peaked at 131,544 today.

Steam Charts for New World:

So they're off by a factor of 7 here and this isn't even close to the most egregious error. MMO-Population.com puts Roblox at 229K active players today which is hilariously inaccurate. Roblox should take the #1 spot on this list by a mile. Roblox is a publicly traded company that reports daily active users every quarter with their Q3 2021 daily active users clocking in at 47.3 million. This means MMO-Population's active playerbase number is off by over 200x.

It's not that just 'some' of the rankings on MMO-Population.com is wrong, they're practically all wrong. The relative rankings are all completely off as well. Anyone with even a cursory understanding of the MMO industry knows that Guild Wars 2 is NOT more active than Elder Scrolls Online OR Black Desert Online. We can also look at publicly available information about Path of Exile's popularity. MMO-Population.com claims the game has 1.19M active players today. This figure is also totally debunked by Grinding Gear Games, Path of Exile's developer, which announced that the game hit an all time high in peak concurrent users with patch 3.13 when the game hit 265,250 players.

In MMO-Population.com's defense, the website does mention on their 'about' page that their data is "not extremely accurate, or in many cases, accurate at all." They base their rankings entirely on reddit subscribers and active user data, which by itself is a meaningless metric and at least the website acknowledges this:

This is more a fun project than anything else. It should be obvious to anyone the reasons why this is not an accurate subscriber count for MMOs. - MMO-Population.com