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The new stats on our page are based on users who are connected to Steam and what games they report to be playing via Steam.
The stats at other places like GameSpy are based on querying our master servers which simply report whatever games servers have told them. These numbers can be incorrect in several ways. First, game servers sometimes misreport player stats in an attempt to lure players onto their server even though its actually empty. Second, they can be higher at times due to players who are not connected to Steam playing on VAC insecure servers. Third, the third party sites using the master server data sometimes misreport it because of problems like not including TF2 "custom" servers (and the players on them) in their numbers since they have not updated to support our recent changes to the master server protocol to split servers into standard and custom buckets.
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