Data sources

Each source has its own clock. Collection frequency is how often GT Effect asks. Time resolution is what one stored point means. Publication frequency is when the provider releases the figure. Those three are not the same thing.

Steam

Concurrent players come from the Steam Web API, GetNumberOfCurrentPlayers. GT Effect stores one snapshot per title, on a 15-minute UTC slot. The catalogue has 30 enabled titles, including Grand Theft Auto V Legacy and Grand Theft Auto V Enhanced. GTA VI is not in that list.

History starts at the first successful collection. A missed slot stays empty. Steam is one store: the same person on PlayStation, Xbox or another PC launcher is not in these figures. The metric is players connected to the tracked games, not owners and not daily uniques.

Twitch

Viewers and channels come from the Twitch Helix Get Streams endpoint. GT Effect walks a fixed list of categories about every 15 minutes. Each page returns up to 100 streams. Streams are deduplicated by stream id, and a duplicate keeps the first viewer count seen. Channels are distinct user ids in that crawl.

complete means pagination finished. partial means the page cap was reached while a cursor remained, so the viewer count is a lower bound. World of Warcraft is allowed 20 pages. The other tracked categories stop at 10. Coverage can therefore differ between categories. A complete crawl is still not a census: the pages are read one after another. Neither status is the whole of Twitch.

There is no GTA VI category in the catalogue. Grand Theft Auto V is a separate category and is not a stand-in for GTA VI.

Fortnite

Global figures come from Epic’s ecosystem API. in_client_peak_ccu and in_match_peak_ccu are the peak inside a 10-minute bucket. They are not an instantaneous count, and they are not Steam snapshots. The collector runs every 15 minutes and can write several buckets that Epic has already closed. A bucket that is still open, or a trailing bucket that is missing one of the two peaks, is not stored.

Experience figures are separate. The daily job runs at 01:07 UTC and stores a peak and a unique-player count for each tracked island: Battle Royale, Reload, Fortnite OG, LEGO Fortnite Odyssey, LEGO Fortnite Brick Life, Fortnite Festival Main Stage, Fortnite Festival Jam Stage. The UTC day still in progress is excluded. Those peaks are not added together, and they are not added to the global peaks. Their grain is a day, not ten minutes.

Roblox

Concurrent players come from the public Roblox games API. playing is the players in one experience at the snapshot, about every 15 minutes. The catalogue has 29 experiences, chosen by Universe ID. visits is a cumulative stock and is not the line on the activity chart.

A panel sum adds playing only when every tracked experience was read in the same slot. That sum is the panel, not Roblox. Experiences outside the catalogue are absent, and a missing experience removes the sum for that slot rather than being treated as zero.

YouTube

Counters come from the YouTube Data API, videos.list. GT Effect reads the public viewCount, likeCount and commentCount about every 15 minutes. A field YouTube omits stays empty. It is not stored as zero.

The public pages use 4 official Rockstar Games videos: Trailer 1, Trailer 2, Extended Look, Launch Trailer. The collector also reads 3 Warcraft videos in the same request. Those videos are excluded from the GTA VI attention pages. The four counters are not every GTA VI view on YouTube, and a view is not a unique viewer.

The counters are cumulative. A later reading can be lower if YouTube revises the counter. The difference between two readings is an observed change, not a certified number of views for that interval. Nothing is reconstructed before the first stored collection.

Wikipedia

Consultations come from the Wikimedia pageviews API, all-access and the user agent, one series per language edition and per UTC day. The catalogue has 148 enabled articles across 10 subjects. A language edition is not a country. A consultation is not a unique visitor. Editions are not added together, and they are not added to YouTube counters.

Wikimedia publishes a day after it closes. The collector asks for the latest complete day and the previous 90 days, then skips days already stored. The current UTC day is never treated as complete. If the aggregate stops before yesterday, the run stops at the last day Wikimedia has actually published.

The job is scheduled at 12:00 UTC. Checked on 6 November 2026, the last completed run finished at 4 November 2026, 16:44 UTC. No later run was recorded. The latest stored consultation day was 3 November 2026. Until a later run completes, Wikipedia is not a live daily feed. The Attention chart uses the stored GTA VI and GTA V series only. The other subjects stay in the catalogue and are not drawn there.

Wikipedia subjects in the collector. Editions are language versions, not countries.

Source comparison

Collection frequency is the schedule. Time resolution is the grain of the stored point. A provider can publish on a third clock: Fortnite closes a 10-minute peak on its own, and Wikimedia publishes a day after it ends.

What each source measures, how often it is collected, and what it does not cover.

How our charts work

Snapshots

A snapshot is one reading at one moment. Steam concurrent players and Roblox playing are snapshots. The timestamp is the collection slot that contains the run, not a promise that every player was counted at that exact second.

Peak buckets

A Fortnite global point is the highest concurrent count Epic reports inside a 10-minute bucket. It is not the count at the bucket’s start, and it is not a Steam snapshot. Putting a peak and a snapshot on the same axis shows two different kinds of number.

Cumulative counters

YouTube stores the public counter, which only grows unless YouTube corrects it. Total views plots that counter. Observed growth subtracts the last counter of the previous block from the last counter of the current block. If the previous block was not collected, the growth point is omitted. The missing views are not spread across the gap. A negative correction is kept.

Indexed mode

Indexed mode on Gaming and Streaming uses a base of 100 so a large series and a small series can be compared by relative change. The following figures are an illustration, not a measurement GT Effect has stored.

Both series start at 100. Series A grows by 10 percent, so its index is 110. Series B grows by 20 percent, so its index is 120. The index does not say that B has more players than A.

On Gaming and Streaming the base is chosen like this:

1. A series with no positive value in the selected period is left off the index.
2. The shared start is the latest of the first positive timestamps among the series that remain.
3. Each series takes the first positive value that covers that start. On a 7-day or full-history chart, the point kept for the opening hour or 6-hour block still counts, even if its timestamp sits slightly before the shared start. On a 24-hour chart the value has to fall on or after the shared start.

Missing data and aggregation

A gap is a gap. GT Effect does not draw a point between two readings, does not copy the previous value forward, and does not estimate the hours a collector missed. The line breaks when the space between points is more than one and a half times the typical gap in that series.

History cannot be extended before the first stored collection. Steam, Twitch, Fortnite, Roblox, YouTube and Wikipedia each start when their own collector first wrote a row.

An isolated Steam reading of exactly zero, sitting between two positive readings, is omitted from the chart. The line breaks across it. The stored row is not rewritten, and a real zero that is not isolated stays visible.

On Twitch, if any reading in an hourly or 6-hour block was partial, the point kept for that block is marked partial even when the highest value itself was complete. A partial point remains a lower bound.

How a longer chart reduces points. The 24-hour, 7-day and full-history views do not use the same rule for every source.

Measuring the GTA VI effect

The observatory is built to make a before-and-after reading possible, and to show where that reading stops.

1. Keep an archive before the launch.
2. Mark a reference event, and say exactly which instant that mark is.
3. Measure how the tracked indicators move.
4. Compare those movements with earlier periods of the same indicators.
5. Describe the changes that the readings support.
6. State the limits, and the other explanations that fit the same readings.

The reference instant is not the official unlock

The countdown, and the before-and-after module on Gaming and Streaming, use one technical instant: 18 November 2026 at 00:00 in Europe/Paris. That is 17 November 2026 at 23:00 UTC.

Rockstar Games has announced that Grand Theft Auto VI launches on 19 November 2026. PlayStation’s US support page says the game releases at midnight local time on 19 November 2026. Midnight local time is a different UTC instant in each region. The technical mark is 24 hours before midnight in Paris on 19 November, and it is earlier still than midnight in the Americas.

GT Effect does not treat 18 November 2026 at 00:00 Paris as the official release hour. A comparison built on that mark should be described as a comparison against the site’s reference instant, not as the hour the game unlocked.

Other reasons a line can move

• Day and night, and the time zone of the people being counted.
• Weekends and holidays.
• Another game, a season, or a live event at the same time.
• A patch or a new piece of content in a tracked game.
• A change in an API, a page cap, or a catalogue.
• A partial crawl, a missed slot, or a provider that publishes late.

None of these is automatically the cause. None of them is automatically irrelevant.

Data freshness

A table that contains old rows is not a healthy collector. The run is the last time a collection finished with status completed or partial. The observation is the latest point actually stored. This table is cached for about five minutes, on top of the collection interval. It does not show logs, keys or internal identifiers.

Latest completed run and latest stored observation. A run is not the same timestamp as the observation.

Independence and attribution

GT Effect is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated with Rockstar Games, Take-Two Interactive, Valve, Twitch, Epic Games, Roblox, Google, YouTube or the Wikimedia Foundation.

The figures are readings of public interfaces and public counters. GT Effect does not offer a raw download. Republishing the underlying data can be restricted by the provider even when a page on this site can be cited. Check the provider’s terms before copying a series out of the charts.

• Steam Web API
• Twitch Helix, Get Streams
• Epic Games ecosystem API
• Roblox games API
• YouTube Data API, videos.list
• Wikimedia pageviews
• Rockstar Games, launch date
• PlayStation, release and pre-load

Using GT Effect data

A figure that can be checked names all of the following:

• The provider, and the GT Effect page that showed the figure.
• The exact metric, in the words used on that page.
• The period, and the UTC date and time of the reading.
• The catalogue that was followed.
• The coverage, when the source has one. A partial Twitch crawl is not a complete one.

A citation shape, with the value left blank on purpose: “GT Effect observed X concurrent viewers across its tracked Twitch categories at [UTC timestamp].”

Source: GT Effect, using data from [original provider].

• Overview
• Gaming
• Streaming
• Attention
• Journal