Unturned does not track analytics beyond the default statistics collected through Steam. As a result, we do not have an accurate method to measure player counts aside from Steam's reported figures and third-party services that monitor public game servers.
Steam collects player count data through the Steam client itself. It includes anyone with the game open while connected to the Internet, regardless of whether they are playing multiplayer, single-player, idling in menus, editing levels, etc.
Note: To discourage players from botting the game for item drops, we permanently disabled playtime drops in late 2022. Steam reported a large decrease in concurrent players in early 2023, which we believe largely coincided with those bots going offline.
Third-Party Trackers
Historically, we have referenced BattleMetrics when discussing estimated player counts for multiplayer activity. BattleMetrics seems to monitor public multiplayer server listings. This generally aligned with our internal tools used when tracking servers for moderation purposes. However, these estimations do not include certain servers.
Some servers now use Steam Datagram Relay (SDR) and related networking configurations that are not consistently visible to BattleMetrics. As a result, BattleMetrics may underreport the current multiplayer population by excluding some SDR-hosted servers from its tracking. Our own internal tools may also miss some servers depending on network configuration.
Based on more recent comparisons, Restore Monarchy uses Steam's newer game server APIs and seems to include a broader set of public multiplayer servers in its multiplayer estimates.