"We'll keep making Warframe if there's one player count," Digital Extremes' Megan Everett asserts. "I don't care what SteamDB says"

The 'player count' debate is, perhaps, my least favorite thing to come out of 2026. Marathon. Highguard. 1348 Ex Voto. A game's success is now, apparently, purely measured by its launch player count: if that number doesn't match some arbitrary value made up on the spot, your videogame is a certified 'flop.' While SteamDB is perfect for tracking the natural ups and downs of online multiplayer games, it isn't dogma: something that Waframe itself proves.

By modern standards, Warframe would have been a 'dead game.' Releasing to a peak of just 22k players back in 2024, it's grown to become one of the biggest online shooters out there. With the launch of The Old Peace back in December 2025, it peaked yet again at a colossal 175,546 on PC alone, and while that's slightly below its highest ever concurrent player count, community director Megan Everett tells me that Warframe "hit new records internally." Not bad for a 'dead game with no talent.'

On March 10, creative director Rebecca Ford dropped a cheeky little X post, which simply read: "Naming the next Warframe we release 'Player Count' to pollute the searches and defend against the discourse." The post, as you might imagine, was quick to explode, with the response pool getting ugly pretty quickly. In a follow up, she points out that "When Warframe released we had 435 other titles to compete with for the attention of millions of Steam users. Now games have 20,014 other games in the same year for many millions of Steam users that have already been exposed to 80,000+ prior releases they might have liked."

I ask Everett for her thoughts, to which she laughs "we gotta get [Rebb] off Twitter!" In all seriousness, however, she acknowledges that "it's always tough in this industry. To be putting a game out now, as Rebb said in her tweets, where you're against 100,000 games of perhaps the same genre or similar, is a battle. For us 13 years ago, there weren't a lot of free-to-play, sci-fi looter shooters happening. We put our heads up and went 'hey look at us, this could be cool!' and it's obviously worked the way it has, but to try and replicate that now is near-impossible. You have to be at the right place, at the right time, to a T, and that is an impossible feat.

"To be able to break records like we did last year, at that point over 12 years [post-launch], approaching 13… Obviously we have to look at the numbers, right? It would be a flaw if we didn't actually look at the data and see what people are doing. It's helpful for us - we can see exactly where someone stops playing Warframe; we can literally see where in The Old Peace people are struggling because they've logged off and haven't logged on for weeks."

"It's very valuable to have those kinds of tools and information," she says. "But I really think that, if we hedged all of our bets and efforts strictly on player count, we would put ourselves into a spiral, because not every update is going to perform like The Old Peace - obviously that's what we strive for, but that is so unrealistic. What we really want to do is just stay alive and meet our goals.

"I think the conversation around player count is interesting, but also frustrating, because you see those comments when people look at SteamDB and they're like, 'dead game.' I literally just watched a video of an indie dev crying about his game making like, 200 grand or something, and I was like: 'that's beautiful.' That's why looking at SteamDB day one doesn't mean anything. It's about how you continue to grow your game and communicate with your players. A bad day one launch doesn't necessarily mean the game is dead. It's not a one-all, be-all number."

Perhaps one of the major contributing factors to The Old Peace's success was the ability to skip to some of the update's new content, bypassing what clocks in at well over 50 hours of story (discounting the resource grind). It's something that Ford was 50/50 on when we spoke last: while leapfrogging the narrative is, to borrow Ford's phrasing, "shitty," in an ever-competitive world, you need a "survival strategy."

I ask Everett about the outcome of that gamble, and if it's something that the developer would consider adding again. "That is a really tough conversation that we have with every single update we do. Whatever we're doing content-wise has to go into the game at a certain point right? What does a player have to do before they get to access The Shadowgrapher, for example? You don't want to put it too far in where it's unobtainable and you logged in day-one all excited and then you're like, 'oh, God, I've got to spend 40 hours.' Oftentimes we try to not do that because we're a 13-year-old game that has so much content. Truthfully, that's the biggest feedback we get, and it's growing feedback: this game is a bit overwhelming. That's something we're going to have to battle for our entire lives.

"[Content skips] are something that we have to experiment with in order to try and combat that. I think our first real stab at that was the Duviri Paradox. When we introduced that we were like 'this is the new beginning to the game if you want it to be!' That maybe wasn't the right move, but we didn't know that until we tried it."

The approach the team took with The Old Peace, however, which allowed players access to two of the new mission types, The Perita Rebellion and The Descendia, allowed OG fans to effectively guide their friends through the latest content, showcasing what Warframe has to offer both from a content standpoint, and as a multiplayer experience. Everett says that this community element is "where we went right. We're going to obviously have to continue to experiment like that, and when we put new content into the game see where it's appropriate.

"What we're doing with the next steps on Tau, yes, you're going to have to have completed a lot of the story to be able to understand that." She references a discussion with the player-base a few years ago, where DE pitched the idea of a full story skip and fans were "so against it." Don't expect that, then, but honestly, as someone who's finally found her way to 1999, I can vouch for Warframe's narrative. Sure, it gets a little messy in some places, but it's absolutely worth the grind.

What brings me back to Warframe, however, is its continued innovation. Its latest character, Follie, lets you draw in your own items and utilize them in combat. Before her, Koumei blended the randomization of dice roll-mechanics to create a frame that could deal devastating amounts of damage, but only if luck was on your side. With Warframe 1999, it added a dating simulator, in a live service game. Digital Extremes continues to do things differently; it doesn't rest on its laurels and hope that battle passes and cosmetics will pay the bills. It gives you a reason to keep coming back.

Everett acknowledges that "not everything is going to hit," but believes that "you've got to try something different." Keeping things fresh is "a tough, tough hill to climb; one that we'll climb for as long as Warframe survives and continues to grow, as long as our players support us. We'll keep making this game even if there's one player count," she laughs. "I don't care what SteamDB says; we're still gonna be here, trying our best."