There are several possible reasons for such a discrepancy.

1) Those are stats specifically for Steam users, and not all Spiral Knights players play it through Steam.
2) Peak users measure just that - the maximum number of users logged in at a single time. It doesn't measure the total number of different users that were logged in.
3) Many players might have alternate accounts.
4) Spiral Knights, while fun, is generally not very friendly toward new players with the Energy system, and it's often cited as a key turn-off for people who are just starting out. A good deal of people probably created accounts, then never came back to the game after being restricted by Mist Energy limitations.
5) People just get bored of the game. Their accounts are still counted for the total account number, but that doesn't mean they're necessarily playing.

>said Haruki Satomi, Vice President of Digital Business at SEGA of America.
Never trust the business people.
Might have been a translation error though, and "millions" meant "a huge amount" or something like that.
The most active steam players there ever were ingame was around 10k just after the Steam release.

Right now it feels like the whole game has about the same population as a single server in other MMOs. I play a lot of lockdown these days and it's a bit disconcerting to see the same people all the time in a game that supposedly has a worldwide playerbase.

My top 3 reasons haven't changed since July

1) The CE system is very new-player-unfriendly.
2) The game hitches a lot, even on high-end systems.
3) Most user reviews (be they blog posts, forum posts, reviews under a 'professional' review, whatever) of SK on the 'net are negative for one or both of the above reasons.

They didn't say active accounts. The game has been around for a lot longer than Steam release and can be accessed via Facebook, SEGA Pass, or a web account. All of which would not be counted by Steam.

Sk has a REALLY low retention rate with the energy system.

~<3 :D :D Jim-Dale-Chan :P :P :( <3

"with about 1% of that being the "peak" on any given day."

I'm reading this as there being about 4 to 5 thousand active players left in the game. That probably explains why 000 is having to milk their remaining players so hard.

Khamsin, I didn't interpret Eurydice's comment to mean that there are 4,000-5,000 active players.

Here's what she said, I think: About 2,000,000 players have tried Spiral Knights. Last month, about 300,000 players played. At any given time, at most 1% of those were playing --- i.e. 3,000 players online. This seems not unreasonable to me --- considering the players in Haven, Advanced Training, Guild Halls, PvP, and the four active gates.

So I don't know what you mean by "active", but if you mean "online all the time", the number is less than 3,000, and if you mean "playing within a given month", then the number is closer to 300,000.

If only 3,000 players are on during the peak, I'm giving 000 a huge benefit of the doubt in suggesting that 40% of the active population, those who play at least six hours a week, aren't on during the peak hours. I think my guesstimate holds pretty well.

"At most 13 are online at any given time."

"more than 90% of them have been online in the past week. "

I think I'm nailing it pretty hard. If you don't know whether the person even plays on a weekly basis, they're hardly active. I think it is fair to say most of the active players are on the peak time and that the majority of people who aren't on during the peak time aren't active.

Monthly active =/= Weekly Active =/= Daily Active. I'd say concurrent is probably the closest guesstimate to weekly and daily active. The likelihood of 300,000 players online each week or day is very, very slim.

Edit: Actually, scratch that, probably closer to 3000 people spend 70-100% of their energy... let's say, "active" is 6 hours put in per week. Then I'd still stick to the 4000-5000 number.

Except by your standards of people who use 70- 100 of their mist in a day it would have to be higher than the concurrent numbers. By gate running - probably the slowest way to use up mist - 100 mist will only last you about an hour and a half. If people use just their mist then log off then by using the concurrent numbers we're looking at ( 24 hr / 1.5 hr ) * 3000 players which would equal 48,000 daily active players. Now I realize I'm simplifying this a lot but it shows pretty clearly that your assumption of 3000 concurrent players equaling the active player base as very flawed. Especially when you consider that an active player would probably not log in every single day - I don't and I'm active enough to participate in this thread.

"Especially when you consider that an active player would probably not log in every single day"

They're not very active if they only log on once a week or month. That's pretty much the opposite of active. Those types fall into the "not active" category with the rest of the 99%.

I think it would be best if you spoke for yourself, which is fine.
but saying the layman believes this and that.. is a bit too far

I never believed that there were 1 million 'active' players.
I do believe that over 1 million players have tried this game tho
I personally have 4 accounts, but only 1 of them is registered to steam, and they are all 'active'
and when I look at steam, I don't think they are the complete picture either.

What is it that you actually want to know. Even the 3k-5k peak players doesn't tell how many people logged in each day.
all it does tell you is how many people were online at the same time.
I would estimate that each day there would be about 10~15k unique accounts logging in. That's just an estimation

I would like to thank Eurydice for actually giving us numbers, because a lot of other games don't.
And I don't know what use these numbers are to the 'layman'.

@Khamsin I think you're coming from the perspective of a hardcore gamer, where not playing a game for at least an hour a day counts as not playing it at all. SK is a F2P game, and one geared towards casual players at that. For a lot of people, playing 1-2 hours every week or two is as much time as they put into any game and, more importantly, these are the same people who will be more likely to buy CE since they A: likely have responsibilities involving making money, and B: don't have the time to grind mist for crowns every day.

Really, the important question is "is the number of active players (by whatever reasonable measure) increasing" and, relatedly, "is the volume of CE being sold increasing, per paying player and/or overall". I think we all want to see this game succeed both socially and financially. As open as Eurydice has been with player numbers, I'm not sure we'll get a really straight answer to these questions.

Personally I'm a bit worried given the recent shadow key fiasco, and the fact that I've been in two guilds so far and both have evaporated into a list of inactive users. Granted the guilds were both casual guilds, not one of the big ones or anything, but still. (At this point I'm thinking I'll probably drop out of guilds entirely, given I haven't found much use in them)

On the other hand, the in-game CE/CR market seems to be pretty liquid, so obviously a lot of people are still buying.

To me, "active" accounts means the number of accounts logged in and playing at any one time. Remember, not everyone plays the game at the same time. At the very least, you have people spread out by time zones. Free to play players are limited as to how long they can play. Not everyone plays the game 24/7. Further, some people can't play at certain times due to their circumstances.

For instance, I have a part time job, college, and share a bad internet connection that cannot support normal internet usage and Spiral Knights at the same time. This means I'm not "active" all the time. But I think I play enough to be one of the 300,000 regulars that play this game.

Considering all this, 1% peak active players at any one time makes sense.

Khamsim, take a look at that Battlefield Online presentation that is linked here somewhere and possibly easier to find on the web and you'll see that while the hardcore spend a lot, a company still needs the "casuals" money because it is still a big slice of the pie. They may spend less, but they got greater numbers.