Saw an article about SteamSpy in my RSS feed and figured I'd look up SK there. You can find it here.
I have no idea how accurate this thingy is but if it's right then something of interest is that SK has an active playerbase of 50k+ players. I would not have expected that!
"I have no idea how accurate this thingy is but..."
+/- 10k players at an undisclosed confidence (normally statisticians use 90/95%).
The parenthesis after the number listed is percentage of "owners" that play it. Given that this is a F2P game, "owner" means "some steam user clicked to install it". I have the odd feeling that SteamSpy functions on assumptions of in their analysis of public knowledge, such as tracking the "currently playing" numbers. Given that information, the number is likely heavily inflated due to SK's recent "giveaway" that encourages players to log in and out frequently throughout the day. The average playtime (~5 minutes) reinforces this hypothesis.
It may be more interesting to view again in a weeks time.
I find the disparity between the median and mean rather telling. If you look at the audience in the past 2 weeks, the mean bounces around 2 to 5 hours, while the median is barely a blip on the radar. It means there is a small group of incredibly devoted players that far outweigh the rest, in terms of playtime at least.
I mean "active playerbase" is kind of a stretch. The amount of time being put in per player over a two week period had a median of about an hour but an average of about 5 hours. In order for you to play on average 5 hours per two weeks, you have to spent around 25 minutes and then just leave.. which is about the same as logging on, checking the auction house and leaving. It is also forseeable that those five hours could be split between 2 moderately sized play sessions, but this seems unlikely when considering the low median. If you did a couple of runs five days a week and took about two hours to finish you'd have 40 hours per 2 week period. That's what I'd call an invested player- they are going home, and in some of their free time, playing Spiral Knights.
From this and my own personal observations that are absolutely 100% flawless, I would expect a small close knit playerbase that actually cares about the game and keeps coming back to it for whatever reason complimented by an outrageous number of people that are simply trying the game and moving on immediately. The observation in question of course being the distribution of parties I see created as well as the general level of gear I see around Haven- a number of 5* knights, most of which I've met or seen before, and at least as many proto-clad knights, fresh from the rescue camp. Amidst these are typically a handful of 3* knights.
Or maybe I'm just misinterpreting the data and seeing what I want to see.