It seems like EA Sports FC 26 has a staggering number of daily active users, according to one content creator who claims to have heard first-hand about its popularity from a developer.

In a recent video by Nate Miller (AKA TheFutAccountant), a football game YouTuber, he speaks on the publicly available Steam daily active users for EA Sports FC 26. On its own, these figures are impressive. According to SteamCharts, the game had a 24-hour peak of 122,006 concurrent users. That’s not shabby at all.

However, it may be significantly smaller than the real concurrent figure across all platforms. Miller claims: “That Steam number of players is so small. When I mentioned that to the EA developer, he laughed. He proceeded to tell me that 9.8m daily active users was the peak number that was hit in this last month.” Miller then says this figure was hit either in late June or July.

He goes on to say that consoles have a large user base compared to PC, and points out that Steam is not the sole PC platform for EA Sports FC (the EA App offers the game, too). He also claims 800,000 live players were in the Clubs mode recently.

As for why there has been such a large number of players hopping into EA Sports FC 26? Usually, this point in the series’ life cycle is when people start looking ahead to the next entry in the franchise, though Miller points to The FIFA World Cup as a cause of much excitement around football, perhaps inspiring people to hop into EA Sports FC 26.

This argument has merit, given EA Sports FC 26 did feature World Cup themed in-game content, with a variety of national teams playable in its The World’s Game mode. There were also special World Cup additions to the incredibly popular Ultimate Team mode, which likely had a big impact.

So it’s a big time for EA’s massive football series, and seemingly for the company as a whole. If these figures from Miller are accurate, they come just as EA is expected to be acquired by a collection of private entities, including private equity company Affinity Partners, the Silver Like investment company, and of course the Saudi Arabian government’s Public Investment Fund.