Short answer: a few thousand at any given moment on Steam, and meaningfully more than that in total. Over nine days of counting, Star Wars: The Old Republic mostly ran between 2,200 and 6,400 players on Steam depending on the hour, averaging around 3,800. Our lowest single reading was 767, in the small hours of August 25, and nothing else came close to it.
Fifteen years after launch, that is a living MMO rather than a ghost town. But the number needs one large asterisk, and most pages answering this question skip it.
What we counted
We check Steam player numbers for the Star Wars catalogue every two hours. Here is every day since we started tracking SWTOR closely, showing the busiest and quietest reading of each day.
| Day | Busiest | Quietest |
|---|---|---|
| Aug 25 | 5,620 | 767 |
| Aug 26 | 5,187 | 2,287 |
| Aug 27 | 4,798 | 2,358 |
| Aug 28 | 4,788 | 2,289 |
| Aug 29 | 5,915 | 3,003 |
| Aug 30 | 6,414 | 3,313 |
| Aug 31 | 5,240 | 2,538 |
| Sep 1 | 4,145 | 2,186 |
The pattern is the ordinary one for an MMO with a global playerbase: a low in the small hours of the American morning, a peak in the evening when North America and Europe overlap. Sunday was the busiest day, which is what you would expect and a good sign that the population is made of regular players rather than a one-off spike.
The asterisk: Steam is not the whole game
SWTOR launched in 2011 and did not arrive on Steam until 2020. Nine years of players installed it through BioWare's own launcher, and many of them never moved. Every number above counts only the people who launch through Steam.
How much is missing? Nobody outside BioWare knows. Community estimates are all over the place: one long-running thread argues the overwhelming majority of the playerbase is not on Steam at all, while another player's poll guessed a majority were. Neither is data, and EA does not publish the split.
So treat our figures as a floor, not a total. The true concurrent population is higher than 6,414 at peak, by an amount nobody can honestly quantify. Anyone who tells you the exact SWTOR player count is guessing.
Is it healthy?
By the only comparison we can make fairly, yes. In the same reading where SWTOR showed 3,358 players, it was the second most-played Star Wars game on Steam, behind only a brand-new release:
| Game | Players at that moment |
|---|---|
| Zero Company (new release) | 27,547 |
| The Old Republic | 3,358 |
| Jedi: Survivor | 1,059 |
| Empire at War | 1,056 |
| Battlefront II (2017) | 873 |
A fifteen-year-old subscription MMO outdrawing every Star Wars game except the one that came out last week is a strong result, especially when its true number is higher than what we can see.
Should you start playing in 2026?
If you want a story-driven Star Wars RPG, the eight class campaigns are free to play and remain the most underrated single-player writing in Star Wars gaming. The population above is more than enough for the group content you will meet in your first hundred hours.
The recent Legacy Reborn update closed a story arc four years in the making, and the next expansion, Masters of the Force, is on the test server now. This is not a game in maintenance mode.
How we count
- Figures are our own readings of Steam's public player numbers, taken every two hours for the Star Wars catalogue. Nine days of data as of September 1, 2026.
- Every comparison in the table above comes from a single moment, so the games are measured against each other fairly.
- Steam only. No console players exist for SWTOR, but BioWare's own launcher is not counted and cannot be.
- We update this page as the data accumulates. The wider picture is in our player-count coverage.
