ACC Playercount Round-up: March 2020

I’ve been keeping track of the amount of players playing ACC for a while now, out of personal curiosity. This basically means I’m importing data from both steamdb and steamcharts into my own spreadsheets. This might seem useless (which it probably is) but I add some value in terms of giving context to flat numbers which the sources do not. So lets get on with that.

March 2020

March sees a significant upward trend, with a steady week-on-week growth. The first week of March saw an average peak concurrent players (the highest amount of people on any time of day concurrently) of 1863. Week 2 of March saw this increase to 1910, while the third week saw the average soar to 2260. The average of March’s fourth week was able to obliterate this number though, with an average peak concurrent number sitting at 2522.

The biggest cause of this growth has to be the COVID19/coronavirus-caused quarantine. Not only are people forced to stay at home and look for new (or rediscover old) hobbies, there is currently no real-life racing going on – suddenly making simracing a viable alternative for people who would previously scoff at the idea.

Something that could further help ACC’s playercount is the added (official!) coverage to charity racing events replacing the real world stuff. Last sunday’s event [watch the final here!] was a great example, possibly pulling in even more new players. If that is actually the case should be visible in the coming weeks and will certainly be something I report on in a future post.

2020 so far

The above graph shows the peak concurrent players since January 1st of this year. You can see the release of the IGTC and subsequent peak in concurrent playercounts in early February. That was a momentary boost, with the effect slowly subsiding, though, at a higher level than before the release of IGTC.

The upward trend becomes clear for the second part of March and if the current trendline is to be believed, an average concurrent playercount of ~2800 is possible by the end of April.

Personally, I err on the side of caution in making such grand claims since the effects of the quarantine will be slowly diminishing. On the other hand, April will see the release of v1.4, which will hopefully see a peak not unlike the release of the IGTC pack.

All time counts

Looking back at the whole dataset it becomes even more clear that Assetto Corsa Competizione is undergoing a surge. We have greatly surpassed 2019’s biggest month in which the game (v1.0) was officially released. After a temporary slump, december saw the first signs of a real recovery.

The above graph also shows the average playercount. If you divide the average number by the concurrent peak numbers, you can sort of see the average playtime per player. This number has been going down as well, indicating that people play longer. But not by much: 0.49 instead of 0.48. Take this number (and graph below) with a grain of salt.

In conclusion: ACC is in a really healthy place right now, and I can’t wait what to see what the future holds for this game. The roadmap shows only parts of the future, it’s in numbers like these that we can maybe look further ahead. A healthy playerbase will buy more DLC, giving Kunos’ publisher more incentives to foot the bill of more development.

Of course, the release of the console ports next June will offer another financial boost to all involved. If possible, I will try to find player statistics on the console versions as well as sales numbers to include in future posts.