NSFW Mod Gets More Daily Users Than ARC Raiders, Bonk

According to the author of one of the most well-known NSFW mods of all time, roughly “400,000 people” boot up their mod “per day.”

For context, that would put it above the daily Steam user count of Grand Theft Auto V, Stardew Valley and Marvel Rivals… combined. Good lord.

The Sims is a popular franchise and, based on SteamDB’s average 24-hour user counts, all four mainline games pull in a combined player count of around 40,000 users every day.

You know what, somehow, pulls in ten times the amount of users? The Wicked Whims mod for The Sims 4.

This is according to an interview with mod author Turbodriver over on Taz (thank you to PC Gamer for the source), when asked how many people boot up Wicked Whims every day.

“On average, 400,000 people per day. That's how often my server is pinged, at least, because someone starts the game and has installed the mod,” Turbodriver replied (Google translated from German).

For context, as spotted by PC Gamer, that would make it the fourth most popular game on Steam, if we’re going off 24-hour user numbers. For further context, ARC Raiders’ last 24-hour peak was 274,768 active users.

A safe for work image from The Sims 4's Steam page, EA

Of course, the real question is, if The Sims 4 is pulling in roughly 33,000 daily users, how in the hell is a mod for the same game generating more than ten times the number of active users?

Good question, and there are likely quite a few different reasons.

For a start, more than 85 million people have bought The Sims 4. It’s actually likely somewhere around 100 million now, according to Electronic Arts.

Obviously, these numbers are spread across several platforms, and it’s impossible to tell how many of those players are on console.

What this likely means is that the majority of The Sims 4’s non-console playerbase is launching it through the EA App, which wouldn’t register on SteamDB.

Also, the MacOS version of the game is a thing, so we can’t rely purely on Windows-based player numbers here.

More importantly, Turbodriver states that their “server is pinged” 400,000 times a day. This means that some of those pings are definitely from the same people, who are booting up Wicked Whims more than once a day… for whatever reason. No judgment here.

It’s impossible to say for sure, but I’d wager the unique number of Wicked Whims players is much lower than 400,000, but likely still somewhere larger than 100,000. Godspeed, gooners.