Player Count

What each expansion did to the peak

The interesting story in this game's numbers is not the total but the shape. It launched into early access, hit 1.0 more than a year later, and then spent the following years being periodically re-opened by expansions — each one pulling a large cohort of lapsed players back at once.

Peak figures come from third-party tracking of the platform's public player data rather than from the API. The most recent entry is the month the current expansion shipped, so it is still settling.

How to read a concurrent count

A concurrent number is how many people have the game open at that instant, and it swings enormously across a day: it dips through the early morning and peaks in the evening, so two screenshots of the same week can differ by a large factor without anything having happened. That is why the peak figures above are more informative than any single reading — a peak captures the day's high-water mark rather than wherever the clock happened to be.

The other thing worth internalising is what a decay curve means. After each expansion the count falls back toward a baseline, and the return to normal is not a failure — it is the same players finishing the new content. The number that matters over years is whether the baseline drifts up, and across the four releases recorded here it has.

If you want the raw figure rather than a rendered one, the endpoint the build reads is the platform's own current-players API, which returns JSON for the app ID this site covers.

What the numbers cover

• Steam only. The count is the PC platform's figure. Console platforms publish nothing equivalent, so the true figure across all platforms is higher and unmeasurable from here.
• Open copies, not active players. Anyone sitting on the menu counts. That inflates the number slightly relative to people actually in a run.
• Modded installs are included. A heavily modded player is counted the same as a vanilla one, so the number does not tell you how many people are playing the game as it shipped.

Where this matters for you depends on what you are using the figure for. As a sign of whether the community is awake, it works well. As a difficulty or quality signal, it does not — the beginner guide covers the things that actually decide a run.

Frequently asked

How many people are playing Risk of Rain 2 right now?

The figure at the top of this page is read from the platform API at build time, so it is a snapshot rather than a live counter. The same number can be queried directly from the API endpoint listed below.

What is the all-time peak player count?

The highest concurrent count recorded on Steam is on the chart below, and it landed in the month Seekers of the Storm released rather than during the game's launch year — expansions, not launch, are what move the ceiling for this game.

Why do the peaks line up with expansions?

Because that is when lapsed players come back. The pattern across four paid expansions is a sharp spike in the release month followed by a slow decay back toward a stable baseline, and the baseline itself has risen with each release.

Does the player count include consoles?

No. The numbers here are the Steam concurrent count. Console platforms do not publish equivalent figures, so any total that claims to cover all platforms is an estimate rather than a measurement.

Does a low player count mean the game is dying?

Not by itself. This is a seven-year-old game, so the baseline count matters less than whether it is enough to fill a lobby — and with online co-op needing only four players, matchmaking is not the constraint. The count is more useful as a signal of when the community is active than as a measure of health.