Fart Together Player Count: Our Own Readings, Not a Guess

At our last reading the Fart Together demo had 1,684 players. The full game reports nothing yet, because Steam publishes no concurrent figure for an app before release.

• We sample the demo (app 5208630) every 5 minutes and store every reading in the repository.
• The full game (app 5117550) is not released until 29 October 2026 and its player endpoint returns no value.
• Every sample is timestamped, so you can see how old the number is instead of trusting a stale count.

Doesn't apply when: This is our own sampling of a public Steam endpoint, not an official live feed, and a two-minute window is a snapshot — not a trend you can plan around.

Why the demo has a player count and the full game does not

Fart Together ships as two separate apps on Steam. The demo is app 5208630 and it has been downloadable since 8 October 2026. The full game is app 5117550 and is listed for release on 29 October 2026.

Steam's public endpoint ISteamUserStats/GetNumberOfCurrentPlayers behaves differently for the two. The demo returns a real player_count. The unreleased app returns {"response":{"result":42}} — 42 is Steam's LimitExceeded result, which in practice means "there is no concurrent figure to publish for this app yet". It is not zero players. It is no data.

That distinction matters, because a fan site that prints 0 playing for an unreleased game is describing something that was never measured. We sample the demo instead and say so on the page.

What this number does and does not tell you

The reading is a headcount of people with the demo running at that moment. It is a good proxy for how many people are curious enough to have installed a free build. It is not a sales figure, not a wishlist count, and not a review score.

It also does not tell you whether those players stay. A demo attracts a burst of people who try one course and leave; the number can look healthy while retention is poor. If you want the retention story, the honest signals are the review count and the discussion activity on the store page, not a single concurrent number.

One more caveat: a two-minute window in the middle of a weekday says almost nothing about the daily peak. We publish the window we actually have rather than extrapolating a curve we did not measure. Over time this page accumulates a longer series, and the trend line becomes meaningful; right now it mostly shows that the demo is being played continuously.

Is 1,600-1,700 players a lot for a co-op demo?

For a two-to-four player physics game with no marketing budget behind it, a demo holding four figures of concurrent players ten days after release is a healthy signal, not a breakout one. Compare it with what the number actually needs to support: a lobby-based co-op game only needs enough simultaneous players for strangers to find each other. At this level, matchmaking is not the bottleneck.

The more useful question is what happens on 29 October 2026. That is when app 5117550 starts reporting, and the two numbers will no longer be comparable — a full release absorbs demo players, adds buyers who never touched the demo, and loses the people who only wanted a free trial. We will publish the full-game series separately rather than splicing two different measurements into one line.

How we collect it, and how you can check us

A small script calls the Steam endpoint, appends a line with the timestamp and the player count to data/players.jsonl, and exits. It is scheduled every five minutes. If the request fails, the script writes nothing and exits with an error — a failed read is stored as a gap, never as a zero.

The raw file ships with the site, so the numbers on this page can be recounted by hand. If a reading is ever older than it should be, the panel above shows the absolute time of the last successful sample along with how long ago that was; we would rather show an obvious gap than a fake "live" badge.

Source note: Player numbers on this page come from our own calls to Steam's public GetNumberOfCurrentPlayers endpoint for app 5208630, written to data/players.jsonl and published unedited, with timestamps. The claim that the full game reports no count is based on the same endpoint returning result: 42 for app 5117550 on 24 October 2026. Release dates come from the official Steam store listing. Nothing on this page is estimated.

What each number on this page actually measures

Three different numbers get called "the player count", and they answer different questions. Mixing them up is how a healthy demo starts to look like a dying game.

Our window is short, so the middle row is the honest gap in this table: we can show you a concurrent reading today, but a meaningful daily peak needs a full day of samples, which we do not have yet. When we do, it goes in this table rather than into a sentence that sounds more confident than the data.

What happens to these numbers on release day

Two things change at once on 29 October 2026, and both make the old series unusable as a comparison. First, the full game (app 5117550) starts reporting its own player count, so there are suddenly two numbers where there was one. Second, the demo keeps its own count, and some of the people in it will move to the paid build rather than disappear.

That means we will publish the full-game series as a separate line rather than continuing this one. If you see a site splice the demo and the full game into a single rising curve, that curve is measuring a change of instrument, not a change in popularity. The release date and price questions live on their own page for the same reason: they change once, and then they are settled.

If you want to compare this number against something more stable while you wait, the Steam listing itself and the 12-point check on which Fart Together is which are both less volatile than a concurrent count.

Reading this number against everything else we publish

A single concurrent count is only useful next to other signals. Here is how we treat each one, and where you can check it yourself.

If a page anywhere tells you the game is dying because one reading dropped, check whether they are comparing the same measurement. Most of the time they are not.

Every row we store has the same three fields, so the series stays auditable:

If you want the app IDs explained rather than the numbers, the Steam demo and download page covers which build you are actually running, and our Steam player notes cover what the store's own charts mean.

Fart Together player count FAQ