There’s one thing that Battlestate Games hardly ever reveals, and it’s the Escape from Tarkov player count. As the game is hosted on a proprietary launcher and platform, it’s impossible to get the numbers with any real sense of accuracy.
It’s super rare for Battlestate Games to mention anything related to player counts, but that’s what happened recently on social media. The head of the studio at Battlestate, Nikita Buyanov, took to social media to dispute raid loading times, and while doing so, he confirmed Escape from Tarkov’s player count at that moment.
The Rarest Mention
Try as hard as I might, I couldn’t find a single reliable source for an Escape from Tarkov player count. It’s something fans of the game wonder about all the time, and if the game were available on a platform like Steam, it’d be much easier to see how many people play it.
That’s why this is a special moment, for Battlestate Games’ most prolific representative has revealed the Escape from Tarkov player count at one moment.
On social media, Nikita was responding to a comment criticizing the core gameplay loop in Escape from Tarkov, including how long it takes to enter a single raid.
To respond to the criticism, Buyanov flashed up a monitoring visual showcasing a graph of matchmaking times covering the last few days. There were a few peaks here and there, but no ‘anomalies’ were recorded, Buyanov stressed, suggesting that matchmaking times are within acceptable limits.
He then dropped the bombshell by revealing how many people were playing Escape from Tarkov at that moment.
‘This is matchmaking wait time chart in seconds – no anomalies detected. Current CCU is something around 45k in PvP.’
Nikita mentioned PvP specifically because that’s where the bulk of the lengthy matchmaking is being completed. The PvE platform loads differently, and players can enter a game in that mode in a matter of seconds.
This raises something interesting, though. It was a while ago now, but Nikita stressed that as a wipe unravels, more players gravitate to PvE, to the point where the end of the wipe usually represents a 50-50 split between PvP and PvE.
The last wipe was on July 9, so it’s fair to assume that 20 – 30% of players must be on the PvE platform. If 45,000 players were active at 9 PM (BST) on a Sunday, we can assume that a further 20,000 or so were playing PvE, going by the math set out by Nikita. That means 65,000 active players, which doesn’t seem like much, but it’s based mostly on conjecture.
Whatever the number is, Nikita’s revelation was the closest we’ve got to an accurate Escape from Tarkov player count ever.
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Grant's adoration for gaming started on the Amstrad CPC in 1996. Now, he's a multi-platform expert gamer with a deep love for the industry, a passion for esports, and more…
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