Sony Inadvertently Leaks Player Totals For (Possibly) Every PS4 Game

Sony has a bit of a history of security failures over the years – PSN being hacked on multiple occasions, among other incidents, being the first that come to mind. Of course, such is common enough with most any major company — things happen. However, this case is a little more interesting in both what happened and what it means.

This wasn’t a data leak in the conventional sense, nor was it any kind of hack job by any “leet” team – Sony published this information out themselves without even realizing it.

Earlier in the past week, Sony released some application called “My PS4 Life” where users of the platform can show off their gaming experience – what games they play, what trophies they have unlocked, what have you. A pretty typical looking “show off what you’ve done” type of thing.

Something this application did that others in the past haven’t done, however, is show you the exact number of people who have unlocked that particular trophy. Combine that with the percentage provided of players of a given game who have unlocked that same trophy, you can quickly do some math to get a reasonable figure of just how many people who may have a given game on the PlayStation 4.

Granted, this is a rough calculation, but is still going to be accurate enough to give a realistic idea on just how many people on the PS4 actually own and play a given game.

Why is this important, you may ask?  Many companies don’t want exact numbers of units sold of a given product out there, for all kinds of reasons. I won’t go into detail as that would basically require me to write a summary of a business course, something I’m damn sure not able to cover adequately, but it suffices to say there are companies that won’t like these figures on the success, or failure, of a given game to be public – if you know anything about the investment speculation and the like then you can already imagine some issues this would bring forth.

I’m not going to go into any more commentary on this, instead I’ll just wait and see what else comes of this.

Link for more info: https://www.reddit.com/r/PS4/comments/a6ssfu/sony_accidentally_disclosed_the_number_of_players/