SAN FRANCISCO, Dec 19 — Game enthusiasts are combing through two sources of PlayStation 4 information to reveal total player numbers for the console’s games.

Sales figures and popularity indices are, typically, closely guarded games industry secrets, but a group of game fans are using two perspectives on the same official source to estimate player totals for the PlayStation 4’s catalogue.

Numbers compiled by Gamstat.com show that the PS4’s most popular game is currently its 2013 release Grand Theft Auto V, with an estimated 51.7 million unique player IDs since release.

Due to the method of calculation, the figure relates to discrete PlayStation accounts that have started up the game at least once and connected online since then and sometime between November 20 and December 4, 2018.

Immediately behind GTA V are Fifa 18 (32.5 million), Fifa 17 (30 million), and Fifa 16 (28.3 million), demonstrating the annual football sim’s power.

The PlayStation 4 edition of Minecraft is next up with an estimated player base of 25.6 million, with 2017’s Call of Duty WWII on 24.6 million.

As the Gamstat site owner explains, PlayStation.com’s official My PS4 Life section uses player information to present members with a personalised highlights reel. One of those highlights is for the player’s rarest in-game achievement, detailing how many other players have obtained the same achievement.

The PlayStation site also presents the same trophy information in percentage form, making it possible to combine the two numbers for a total playerbase estimate.

PlayStation 4 players are therefore contributing their Rarest Trophy data to the relevant Reddit thread, enabling Gamstat to compile an overall ranking.

The figures are offered as player count estimates rather than sales figures because players can share or resell game discs between themselves and via intermediaries, or access the same downloaded game using different player accounts on the same PS4 console.

An identical technique was used in August 2018 to discover a 9 million playercount for April 2018 release God of War, after its studio announced that 493,240 players had achieved a Platinum trophy. At the time of writing, that game’s My PS4 Life derived ranking has not yet been added to Gamstat. — AFP-Relaxnews