Analysis

What the data says when you measure all of it.

The trade press covers the demos that already won. We measure the whole field. These are the findings, methodology public, numbers quotable.

The ghost-demo study · updated 2026-09-12

Three in ten Steam demos show no sign of a player

We tracked roughly 2,100 Steam demos from the day they went live this June, polling each one's live player count over and over, the way you would take a pulse. Of the 811 we can score on a matched basis, **29% show no ev