From Fatshark - LoPuS in the modding Discord on 5/13/24:
A note on the separate player bases, we have no exact number on how many players play with mods enabled vs without but looking at the numbers we would hazard a guess at between a third and half of all Darktide players on pc currently play with mods.
Thanks for posting that! It’s interesting to see, though its odd they imply they could pull the numbers but didn’t and just guessed instead. Looking at download rates from Nexus and comparing that to the overall industry estimated title sales, it would imply more like the previously noted Skyrim number of ~8-10% in total, and assuming PC sales were 75% of that, that’d be maybe around 15% of PC players?
The numbers he’s referencing were related to crashes, data he was sharing with the modding community for educational purposes.
My assumption is that their telemetry didn’t/doesn’t track modded clients outside of crashes, so the estimate is based on parsing the crash data. And that data includes a lot of noise, like the crashes from mod developers and unending typos.
I’d take FS’s 30-50% guesstimate as accurate (or as accurate as we’re likely as get) though.
I’ve seen exiting the game or using alt-f4 or task manager to forcibly close during an infinite loading screen register as a crash on my end before.
I wonder if that registers as a false-positive. Seems like a challenging thing to get much more than a ballpark estimate at the best of times.
seems like my guess was decent enough…
It’s interesting, as in this instance either Nexus mods download rates are wildly under-representative, Darktide sales are substantially worse than estimated, FS’s guess is just wrong, or retention patterns among specifically PC players are far more heavily correlated to mod usage than almost any other title I can recall. Maybe some combination? All are possible I guess.
laughs in 500+ new vegas mods
last time i modded fallout 4 without wabbajack it took around 11 or so hours comparing loadorders/conflicts/crashes due to nvidia flex not being supported anymore, got my debris anyways thanks to just another mod.
a tiny text file in darktide being too much for average joe… i shudder for the future 
I find mods easier than fat shark randomly changing your settings and blanking your trees, especially the stuff we have to go digging in the win32 settings to properly swap flags. If it crashes, look for the line in the report that says ‘this mod didn’t work’. Or just open the modder discord, they figure out which mods break on update together within minutes and often have fixes up within an hour or 2 of the patch going up. True heroes those lads.
Lopus shared those numbers in mid-May, when the Steam player count was around 4K average. Judging by the lowest average counts ever, a lot of those folks were probably hardcore players, who I’d guess are more likely to mod.
The numbers also seem to have been captured during a short period (after the “last hotfix” before Lopus posted), so my assumption is that the guesstimate is based only on players who were active during that time.
You can download mods. Field is level.
-“I got an error message on the screen”
-“What did it say?”
-“IDK, I didn’t read it and just clicked OK”
Ah yeah that timing would also be a good explanation, that was a particularly thin time for players I’d dropped off for much of that time myself, so that could figure right.
It’s depressing, but if you’ve ever spent time in the IT or tech support fields, you wouldn’t be surprised. 
I can spend hours recounting horror stories of just getting users to open a browser and navigate to a website. The number of people who’s personal businesses depend on a single ancient machine that has no data backup setup, and who are utterly incapable of accepting a remote support link sent, is shocking. I once revealed the dark secret of shift-clicking to select multiple items and tabs in Excel to a room full of office workers and managers who had been doing spreadsheets for decades. Dealing with younger users who have only ever used pre-built machines/tablets/phones in walled e-gardens (with automatic updates and limited user access to system functionality) and have never had to navigate a file system, rollback a driver, or even ever boot a device into safe mode is a…treat.
The estimation for steam, and at release, is 28 M$
NumericUI is like one of the most used mods. It has released a new version the december 3rd. It has been downloaded 24k times.
for Steam, at this period we had 16k players. This does not take into account Gamepass players.
Considering these numbers, I doubt that the players part that use mods is less than 33%. I would expect something above 50% of regular players.
i thought we talked “average” not your recent north korean refugee 
the most relaxing part of working “with” people so far was doing “repo” and that tells a lot 
Following the Steam Revenue Calculator there, FS’s estimated cut of sales is $28m, total estimated revenue nearing $100m, if we assume average sale price of $30 (mid point between full launch MSRP and typical recent sales price), and not accounting for Cosmetics sales, that gives us a PC sales base of about ~3 million off that $100M revenue total.
Aye, Numeric is the most used single mod in and of itself, however, on these counts, one is a sum over a period, the other is a maximum count at single point in time, I’m not sure how much we can directly compare these without additional data, particularly with the spike in all mod downloads of late (between returning users looking at content updates and all the mods that needed fixes with Grim Protocols to stop crashes necessitating new downloads).
Peak players is a hard thing to judge by as its a single point in time, using the average play rate may be more useful, but I don’t know what a good extrapolation on the ratio of average online players to total active player base is, if that’s 20% then I supposed there’s a good case for most of the PC playerbase running mods using NumericUI as a benchmark against the last 30 days, if that’s more like 5-10% however, then I’d expect mod usage to be much more limited, I just don’t know where that ratio would actually lie.
Totally agree. Especially cause at one time this is US players, at an other this EU players. Not even talking about others…
This gives a simple idea, that does not take into account also console players.
That’s why I used the words regular PC players.
Couldn’t you use unique downloads for the mod enabler “mod” as a number of modded PC games?
Can use mods without the framework.
Yes, this is how I would venture to estimate total mod users. The mod loader and framework each have about 160k unique downloads.
The biggest missing piece of the puzzle, of course, is actual sales/players. But then overall sales don’t mean much. Like all games, there are surely plenty of people who play for an hour or two and never again.
That’s why I think the 1/3-1/2 figure is the best to go by: it’s based on a snapshot in time, but it’s likely more representative of reality than trying to suss out how many people modded vs purchased the game.
That’ll tell us the number of unique users that downloaded it, and it can tell us what proportion of the total sales base installed mods coupled with the estimates above (in which case, ~2.5% of the total PC sales base has downloaded the latest mod framework currently at 73k unique DLs), but we don’t know the proportionality of those downloads to currently active users, and we don’t know the proportion of PC to Console players either.
It’s certainly more accurate than saying 2.5% of PC users, considering the number of people who buy a game and then don’t play it/launch it 3 times or less (or what have you). Of the players who actively play the game the number who use some sort of mod is likely significantly higher, increasing the higher you get. The odds of someone using one of the ‘cheat’-y (AKA controversial) mods also increases like mad the higher you get.
