The official answer to “how many people play Horizon right now” is on playhorizon.dev/stats. Every running Horizon game sends an anonymous “I’m playing” ping once a minute, the telemetry server counts the sessions that pinged in the last two minutes, and the page shows that exact number plus peaks and history. Our own stats page measures something narrower: how many players are online on the Official Horizon SMP, which we ping ourselves. We began recording on 9 November 2026, so there’s no trend to read yet.
What the official count measures
The ping is described in detail in Horizon’s telemetry docs. While the game runs (not a dedicated server, a benchmark or a run that quits by itself), a background thread sends one ping a minute, plus one straight away when a world is opened to or closed from LAN or friends. It contains:
session: 128 random bits made when the game starts, kept only in the game’s memory;version: the Horizon release;platform: linux, macos, windows or other;lan: whether a LAN or play-with-friends world is open.
Nothing else. No account, no install ID, no world, server, settings or hardware; the server refuses a ping that carries more. Sessions are kept in memory only, never on disk, and never with the sender’s address. A session counts while its last ping is under two minutes old.
Project owner Ludovic Marie decided on 22 October 2026 to count every player this way, with or without consent to the optional data switches, and to say so: the launcher shows it as an “Always on” row next to them. Everything else Horizon can collect is off by default. Our safety guide covers the rest.
How to read the official numbers
The stats page shows players now, today’s peak, the all-time peak, how many have a world open to LAN or friends, and a split by operating system. Its history keeps totals only:
- every minute for 7 days,
- per hour (average and peak) for 90 days,
- per day (average and peak) for good.
The charts offer 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days and all time, each point showing the highest and the average count in its slot (5 minutes, an hour, 3 hours or a UTC day).
Three caveats when quoting it:
- It counts games, not people. A new random session is made at every start, and two sessions of one player can’t be linked. Someone running two copies counts twice.
- Some play isn’t counted. Dedicated servers, benchmarks and automated runs don’t ping. Vanilla players on a Horizon server obviously don’t either, since they aren’t running Horizon.
- Opting out is possible but niche. The telemetry docs list
HORIZON_TELEMETRY_URL=off, which sends nothing at all, ping included. It exists for tests and harnesses, but anyone can set it.
The launcher shows the same live number on its Play page (“N playing now”), and next to it “M on the official SMP”, from a status ping the launcher itself sends.
What our stats page measures
We don’t copy playhorizon.dev’s numbers. The official count is served through that site’s API, its robots.txt asks crawlers to keep out of /api/, and we respect that. So our stats page links to the official page for the global total and shows only what we measure ourselves:
- The Official Horizon SMP at
play.playhorizon.dev. Our server pings it every five minutes with the standard server-list status ping, the same one your game’s Multiplayer screen sends. The address has an SRV record pointing at port 24454, which is why you don’t type a port when you join. - Community servers from our server list, pinged the same way.
For a sense of scale: on 9 November 2026, when we first checked, the SMP answered with 58 players online out of 200 slots. One reading is all it is.
What the chart will show over time
Since recording started on 9 November 2026, the SMP chart has only a few points. As data comes in, it will show:
- players online at each 5-minute ping, with gaps where the server didn’t answer;
- daily peaks and averages once a few days have passed;
- the daily rhythm across time zones once a few weeks have passed.
What it won’t show: total Horizon players (use playhorizon.dev/stats for that), unique people, or anything about who is playing. A status ping returns a count, a server description and sometimes a short sample of names; we chart the count.
Why the two numbers differ
The official count includes everyone in single player, on LAN, on vanilla servers and on any Horizon server. Ours covers one server with a 200-player cap. If you host your own, see how to host a Horizon server. New to Horizon itself? Start with what Horizon is.