When a Game Company Announces "100 Million Players," It Rarely Means Copies Sold. Here's What Monthly Active Users Counts Instead.

Grab the second controller. Watch what happens when you read the next launch headline. A company announces "100 million players," your group chat reads "100 million copies sold," and both halves of that sentence are doing different jobs. The players number counts visits inside a month. The sales number counts transactions across a game's whole life. Monthly active users count visits, not sales, and the gap between those two counts is where launch week lives.

Confirmation status up front, because you'll want it for everything below: every definition in this piece comes from the company that publishes the number, in that company's own earnings documents, opened in full. Where a company gives you a figure and skips the definition, the piece tells you that too.

Monthly Active Users Count Visits, Not Sales, and Each Company Counts the Visits Its Own Way

Start with the cleanest printed definition on the record. Activision Blizzard's earnings releases carry the definition as a footnote, word for word, quarter after quarter. In Activision Blizzard's own wording, MAUs are "the number of individuals who accessed a particular game in a given month," and the company averages a quarter by adding its three monthly counts and dividing by three. Read the next two sentences of that footnote before you quote any Activision Blizzard number anywhere. An individual who accesses two of the company's games counts as two users. For Activision and King, an individual who accesses the same game on two platforms or devices counts as two users too. For Blizzard, that same person generally counts as a single user. One company, three counting rules, all printed in the same footnote.

Sony counts a different thing and says so in a different shape. Sony's definition, printed in its results materials, calls PlayStation monthly active users "an estimated total number of unique accounts that played games or used services on the PlayStation Network during the last month of the quarter," based on company research, and Sony warns the figure may be updated later. Accounts, not people. The whole network, not one game. The last month of the quarter, not an average of three. Ubisoft counts a third thing. Ubisoft's Universal Registration Document defines MAU as the number of unique players who, over the course of a month, played at least one game published by Ubisoft on any platform — and the compensation-policy version of that definition covers personal computers and consoles and leaves mobile out.

You've now got three yardsticks with three different lengths, and every headline that lines them up as one ranking has already failed you.

Activision Blizzard's 368 Million Counts People More Than Once, on Purpose, in Print

Activision Blizzard reported overall MAUs of 368 million for the quarter ended September 30, 2022. Run that figure through the company's own footnote and watch what it becomes. A player who opens a Blizzard game and a King game in the same month counts twice. A "Candy Crush" player who plays on a phone and a tablet counts twice for King — and King alone reported over 200 million monthly active users for the "Candy Crush" franchise in that same release. A Blizzard player on two devices generally counts once. The 368 million is a real number, reported under a stated definition, and it still isn't a headcount of human beings. It's a sum of per-game visits, averaged across the quarter's three months.

Here's the couch test for your setup. If you've got one console and one phone, and you touch two Activision Blizzard games on both screens in a month, the company's Activision and King rules can count you up to four times. You bought, at most, a much smaller number of things. The count measures how wide the door swung. It never claims to measure what you paid at the door — the footnote's honesty is the whole story, and the headline version that drops the footnote is where the trouble starts.

Sony's 132 Million Counts Accounts Once, and Microsoft's 120 Million Arrives With No Definition Attached

Sony reported PlayStation monthly active users reaching a record 132 million accounts in December 2025, the last month of its third quarter, per Sony Group's February 5, 2026 results speech. Sony's count runs the opposite way from Activision Blizzard's in the one place that matters for comparisons. One account counts once, whether that account played one game or twenty, and the activity can be a game session or a network service. Sony also labels its figure an estimate from company research. So Sony's 132 million and Activision Blizzard's 368 million don't sit on the same scale at all — different units, different windows, different rules — and a chart that ranks them against each other is comparing a headcount of accounts with a sum of visits.

Microsoft gives you the third case, and it's the one that should slow you down the most. On Microsoft's fiscal 2023 second-quarter earnings call, on January 24, 2023, Satya Nadella reported that gaming monthly active users "surpassed a record 120 million during the quarter." The call states the figure and moves on. It doesn't print a definition beside it — no account rule, no per-game rule, no window narrower than the quarter. That doesn't make the number false. It makes the number ungradeable from the document that carries it, and your move as a reader is to hold it as a company-reported record with its method unstated, not to lend it Sony's definition or Activision Blizzard's.

Registered Accounts Count Everyone Who Ever Signed Up, and EA's Old Table Proves the Gap in Two Lines

The fourth count in the wild is the quietest and the biggest. A registered account is created once and never expires from the total, so a registered-users figure only grows, even when the players behind the accounts left years ago. Electronic Arts printed the contrast in a single table in its third-quarter FY11 release, for the quarter ended December 31, 2010. EA reported Monthly Active Users in Social Games of 39 million for that quarter. Directly underneath, EA reported Core Registered Users of 98 million. Same company, same quarter, same page: 98 million accounts on file, 39 million of them active in social games that quarter. The 59 million in between weren't lying and weren't playing. They'd registered, and registration is a lifetime count wearing a monthly count's clothes.

Watch for that swap in modern dress. A service that quotes you its all-time sign-ups is quoting you a number that can't go down. A service that quotes you monthly active users is quoting you a number that can, and companies feel that difference in their stock price, which is why the monthly figure is the one they define in footnotes and the lifetime figure is the one they put in anniversary posts.

Playing Right Now Is a Fifth Count, and Draft 43 Already Timed It for You

One more number completes the set, and this desk has timed it before. Concurrent players — the count of people inside one game at one moment, on one platform — is the spikiest figure in launch coverage, and our earlier explainer on game numbers walked it in full: Steam's live count is exact, Steam-only, and refreshed in minutes, and a peak moment isn't a sales figure and isn't a monthly figure either. The short version rides fine here. A concurrent peak tells you how full the room got at its fullest second. A monthly active count tells you how many visits the room logged across a month, under one company's counting rule. Copies sold tells you how many transactions the game has banked across its life. Registered accounts tell you how many names the guest book holds since the book opened. Four honest numbers, four different questions, and the only dishonest move in the whole system is swapping one for another in a headline.

So here's your pocket test for the next announcement, and it fits in one breath. Ask who counted it, ask what got counted — a visit, an account, a sign-up, a transaction, a moment — and ask which window the count covers. If the announcement won't tell you all three, you're holding a door count, and door counts are fine right up until somebody spends money based on them. If you're pricing what a player base means for hardware next, our attach-rate explainer is the companion piece, and our Switch 2 earnings account shows a maker counting copies the plain way, one sale at a time.