The top ten still hold 43% of the catalog, but they are no longer the same games

On Sunday, November 1, 2026, in Statcade's daily reading at around 5:00 UTC (6:00 in Italy), Phantom Blade Zero had 534,429 players online on Steam at the same moment. Counter-Strike 2, in the same minute, had 527,391. For the first time since the site has kept a consistent history, starting on October 17, a title other than Counter-Strike 2 or Dota 2 stood first in the catalog. The margin was 7,038 people, out of 5,514,002 players recorded that morning across 305 games with a count.

Phantom Blade Zero, developed by S-GAME Studio and released on October 28, two days before the first point available in the series, is also the third game, in this short history, to have passed 500,000 players online in a 5:00 UTC reading, after Dota 2 and Counter-Strike 2. Ten days later, on Wednesday, November 11 at 5:19 UTC (6:19 in Italy), it had fallen to 139,128 players and stood fifth. The top ten's share, though, was almost unchanged: 43.02% on November 11, 44.1% on November 1, 42.06% on October 17. Over three weeks, the top of the catalog was stable as a share and mobile in its names.

On October 17, in the same series, the top ten were Counter-Strike 2 (568,345), Dota 2 (505,317), PUBG: Battlegrounds (302,533), WARDOGS, AION 2, Bongo Cat, Apex Legends, ARC Raiders, Call of Duty and Warframe. By November 11, WARDOGS, ARC Raiders and Warframe were gone. In their place stood Phantom Blade Zero, ROB RUN and Probably Stolen - Cyberpunk Shopkeeper Sim, the last of these also released on October 28 and published by tinyBuild. AION 2, already in the ranking in mid-October, is still there, eighth with 109,434 players online. Bongo Cat, a free pastime game from Irox Games, listed on its store page as March 5, 2025, had risen from sixth to fourth, with 160,211 people: more than Call of Duty, on a Wednesday morning.

Four games whose Steam store pages carry a 2026 date — Phantom Blade Zero, ROB RUN, AION 2 and Probably Stolen — add up, on November 11, to 455,282 players online, 11.00% of the catalog. On October 17, in the same band, the 2026 releases were two: WARDOGS and AION 2.

ROB RUN, a free early-access crime sandbox from Kefir, came out on November 4. In Statcade's history the first point is November 6, with 24,697 players; on November 11, in the 5:19 UTC reading, it was seventh with 120,836, almost five times as many across five readings. November 10 is missing, as is the entire week from October 19 to 24: the site has no 5:00 UTC snapshot for those days, and this piece does not estimate a number for them. Phantom Blade Zero's first two days, October 28 and 29, are also absent from the series: the high of 534,429 on November 1 is the highest Statcade has recorded for that title, not necessarily the peak of the whole day.

The decline that followed is sharp, but not linear. On November 7 and 8, Saturday and Sunday, Phantom Blade Zero was still at 332,346 and 345,061 players online. By Monday the 9th it was already at 167,657, and on Wednesday the 11th at 139,128: 74.0% below the November 1 figure, measured only on the points in the series. Probably Stolen reached its own high in the series on November 8, with 135,167 players, and on November 11 was ninth with 85,884.

This rotation of names does not widen the top in terms of share. Across nineteen readings, the weight of the top ten stayed in a narrow band, between 41.90% on October 18 and 45.85% on October 28, on seventeen days out of nineteen. The only readings outside that band are Monday, October 26 and Tuesday, October 27, when the share rose to 47.76% and 48.32% and the Herfindahl-Hirschman index (HHI) reached 430.5 and 461.6, the highs of the series. What drove them was not the weekend: it was Dota 2, which reached 602,670 and 659,075 players online, with a 15.88% share on October 27, in a weekday catalog of 4,149,080 people. On November 11 the HHI is 290.4, below the 317.8 of October 17; the “equivalent number of games” given by Statcade, 10,000 divided by the HHI, is 34.4, against 31.5 in mid-October.

What does move, and by a lot, is the total. Across the seven Saturdays and Sundays in the series the catalog averaged 5,510,482 players online; across the twelve weekdays, 4,179,605: 1,330,877 fewer people. On average, weekends run 31.8% above weekdays. The high is Sunday, November 8, with 5,687,888 players across 307 games. The two lows fall on Thursdays: 3,895,328 on October 29 and 3,949,307 on November 5. The ratio of the high to the low is 1.46. The top ten's share, in the same comparison, is almost flat: 43.33% on average at the weekend, 44.73% on weekdays. If the two Dota 2 days are set aside, the weekday average falls to 44.07%, indistinguishable from Saturday and Sunday. On weekends the catalog does not grow more concentrated: it fills up. The same rhythm shows up in individual titles, at the same time of day. Counter-Strike 2 had 375,168 players online on Thursday, November 5, 548,253 on Saturday the 7th and 536,539 on Sunday the 8th. Call of Duty, over the same three days, went from 104,177 to 175,423 and 179,187.

These figures do not describe all of Steam, or a full day. Once a day, at around 5:00 UTC, Statcade asks how many players are online at that instant on each game in its Steam catalog, and adds up only the titles that have a count. On November 11 the Steam data collected by Statcade, updated at 5:19 UTC, cover 434 games tracked, of which 314 are on Steam and 312 have a number greater than zero; those 312 add up to 4,139,653 people. The store is larger, and in the same minute there were players outside this list too. The history used here starts on October 17. October 19–24 and November 10 are missing. On November 4, PUBG: Battlegrounds stands at 25,690 players online, against 222,415 on the 3rd and 225,961 on the 5th: the point is anomalous, and that day the title drops out of the top ten. Leaving it in the series does not materially change the weekday average of the total (4,186,139 without that day, rather than 4,179,605), but that November 4 should not be used to tell a story of a collapse in PUBG.

The October 17 article, “Steam, October 17: three games hold a quarter of all players,” used that day's catalog: 310 games with a figure, 5,403,458 players online, top ten at 41.2%. The concentration series recalculates past days on the current catalog — the same minute, with Counter-Strike 2 still at 568,345, comes out as 302 games and 5,293,575 players online, top ten at 42.06% — and the comparisons in this piece use only that series, not the total in the October monthly report, which was taken at 22:10 UTC on October 31.

In November, 5:00 UTC is 6:00 in Italy, late evening on the US west coast, early afternoon in East Asia. It is a fixed time of day, not any one market's peak hour. A Wednesday evening, or a Saturday afternoon, would yield a different picture. What the series allows us to say, at this hour and on this list, is narrower and more solid: over three weeks the weight of the top ten did not blow out, and it is not the weekend that compresses it. The names inside that band have changed.