In the amount of time it takes to write this sentence, how many people are gaming at this time?

(10 seconds. It took me awhile to think of phrasing…)

PC

There are currently 5 million users logged into steam, 300 thousand of which are playing DOTA 2, 150 thousand of which playing Counter-Strike: GO and 56 thousand of which playing Team Fortress 2, and 16.6 thousand still playing Counter-Strike Source. Doing a bit of math, we roughly have 500k players across just 4 games and mainly in just DOTA 2 and CS:GO. So, 10% of the Steam-PC gaming population is playing DOTA 2 and CS:GO at this moment.

Steam thankfully gave us a nice graph of the daily log-ins so we can do a bit more fun math at the moment. With a peak of ~6.5 million and a valley of ~3.75 million, that leaves 2.75 million users in flux on Steam daily. That means that there’s always the population of Los Angeles (3.85 million) always logged into Steam, or that computer’s being left on throughout Los Angeles can be tracked through Steam. “Hi, Rolling-Blackouts! Nice to see you again, you forget something?”

This 2.75 Million is interesting because we can determine how many people are signing on/off throughout the day. 2.75 million extra on in 12 hours, 2.75 million extra off in 12 hours. With a bit of math of 2.75 [users]/(60 * 60 * 12)[seconds per 12 hours]    = 20,833 users logging on per second during the on hours, off hours. Also meaning that ~200,000 users logged on to steam in the 10 seconds it took to write my opening question. And given a standard average across games being played per user, that means that ~20,000 users logged in to play one of the 4 games mentioned earlier, (DOTA 2, CS:GO, TF2, and CS:S). Roughly 11,500 for DOTA2, 5,700 for CS:GO, 2000 for TF2, 600 for CS:S.

For non-Steam games, it was reported by Riot that there are 27 million people that play League of Legends daily with 7.5 million on concurrently, which means that roughly 28,000 users are playing per second, 2,800 games being played in Summoner’s Rift, ARAM, or Dominion at any given time. [http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2014/01/27/riots-league-of-legends-reveals-astonishing-27-million-daily-players-67-million-monthly/]

Console

Roughly 100,000 gamers playing Call of Duty: Ghosts on PS4, with other consoles getting around 30,000 to 50,000 at regular hours. Given a modest estimate, that’s roughly 300,000 players playing CoD: Ghosts across all console.

Numbers are harder to get for console gaming but it’s hard to build more onto this from here, except that CoD: Black Ops 2 had a peak of roughly 800,000 players across all platforms. A large drop for the yearly giant, but one to curb the yearly release cycle after CoD: Advanced Warfare’s release?

In the 10 seconds it took me to write my opening question, there are at least 12 million gamers playing something right now, and this is only on online mediums. Off-line games aren’t even touched on this list because they’re harder to get, but you can bet there are plenty of plays on those as well.