SteamDB Daily Active Users ranking is no longer accurate
TLDR: SteamDB daily active users rankings have not been accurate since ~May 11th and can no longer be trusted as accurate. I'll be informing SteamDB of this as well, but this issue is on Valve's end, not theirs.
I realize that this is a steamdb post, hopefully this falls under "actually well researched and valuable information" and will be allowed to stay here, because it seems like people have not realized something has broken with the daily active users ranking on steamdb (and here, if you select Daily Active Users in the dropdown: https://store.steampowered.com/charts/mostplayed ). If mods disagree, feel free to delete and I'll repost in the megathread, but this seemed broadly interesting to me, and given how much steamdb numbers are talked about in relation to Marathon, one such number being literally broken seemed relevant to this subreddit.
I first noticed something was wrong when Marathon S2 released, along with the free week, and it remained unchanged in the daily active users ranking. I then noticed that, while it occasionally moves between 150-155-ish, it's position relative to the games around it (notably, Destiny and Tarkov) have remained unchanged. They are always in exactly the same relative position with each other, for a couple months-ish. You can also notice weird things like Zenless Zone Zero being rank #2745 (seems... unlikely), and Gothic Remake not even having a ranking. There are many such bizarre things if you look especially at recently released games, and at games released around May 11th (Far Far West is a good example, allegedly at rank #36 with a 24-hour peak of merely 3000 players... but on May 11th it had recently released and had 27509 concurrents)
Anyway, I did some digging into what api endpoint is actually powering steamdb's chart. I eventually tracked it down to this url:
Encoded in there is a sort=30 (30 is the identifier for the type of sort, in this case the same type that steamdb is using to power the daily active users ranking. You'll see the same top 20 in that json response you see on steamdb, and if you change the "0" after "start%22%3A" to a "140", you'll see games 140-160, which will include Marathon at spot 152. This is an undocumented api, I just had to trial and error sorts 0-30 until I found this, which also means there's almost certainly no guarantee that these will always be stable contracts or keep working.
Now, here's the interesting thing. There's also a an api endpoint that powers this page on steam: https://store.steampowered.com/charts/mostplayed (change the "Most Played" to "Daily Active Users" in the dropdown to see the chart I mean). First, you might notice that this ranking is quite different than what you see on steamdb. This page is powered by the following api endpoint: https://api.steampowered.com/ISteamChartsService/GetMostPlayedGames/v1?input_json={%22context%22:{%22language%22:%22english%22,%22country_code%22:%22US%22},%22data_request%22:{%22include_basic_info%22:true}}
If you hit that link, you'll notice that this is the same ordering you see on the Daily Active Users page on steam itself (my link in the above paragraph). But perhaps more interesting, note the first field in the json response: rollup date, which is 1778457600 (rollup in software engineering basically means calculating or aggregating data). That's a unix timestamp corresponding to May 11th, which just happened to match my "around two months" estimate of when the steamdb charts (and the corresponding first endpoint I linked here) stopped working.
So that steam page (not steamdb) daily active users list is for sure from May 11th, and has stopped updating. SteamDB itself is powered by a different, undocumented endpoint (that incidentally allows seeing more than the top 100 games, presumably why they used it). The endpoints are no longer in sync, and clearly something was changed on May 11th to make the data no longer valid. Since it's not publicly documented, they may have just decided to let that sort=30 endpoint break in such a way that it behaves somewhat nondeterministically, but it isn't literally fixed in time to May 11th like the other endpoint is.
So whether this is unintentional or intentional on Valve's part is unclear, but the API responses and daily active user rankings (on both steam and steamdb) are no longer accurate since May 11th.
Apologies for the wall of text! But given the emotions around steam numbers, I figured receipts were necessary to make it clear this isn't an agenda-driven opinion, just an observation that something is broken and the investigation to show it's more than just a hunch.