dust

I don't think you would need to query every gameserver though dust, it would be pretty easy just to add a simple port monitor to a control panel program which would just see how many people are connecting to that port.

This way it's not querying all gameservers at once, it's constantly monitoring connections(or you could set a time delay) & you could update a database every 30 minutes or so to make nice pretty graphs.

Obviously it wouldn't show any specifics such as what game, max clients, playernames etc but it would make nice accurate graphs

That solutuion would use very little cpu & ram.

that would be totally inaccurate cuz you would get tons of "fake players" due to the network activity. The best and most accurate way would be to run a scruipt locally on each pmachine to query each server then store the stats locally and every X minutes the main stats server would request the stats from each machine and do the maths. but even that would be inaccurate due to the fact that it cant be live, cant be ran too often and some games cant be queried properly. Not to mention the bots in game that would be counted as players.

Anyway nice debate but the player stats thingie is something you cannot trust, if you wana know about a GSP size the only thing you can trust are sales. And for what I have read from different sources Verygames is supposed to be by far the biggest european GSP with a sales amount of 900,000€ for the year 2009. You can correct me if Im wrong providing sales from other GSP's but I doubt its a coincidence if they made a partnership with google. Also they were developping "itinerant techs" basically ppl coming at your home to help you out with your server, idk at what stage they are with that but you gota be a real big one to provide such a service (wondering if it has/will have extra cost tho).

True, if you are running some cheap control panel.
The graphs are correct.
A good scripted script, isn't lagging the server at all as you can see..

You can also count down all the used slots per server and see for yourself ( if you got a day off )

not about control panel neither lags on game servers lol. Its obviously about CPU load for a script querying so many game server.

Alright, as you wish then they're the biggest with 5% of the gamers i3d has.

if ur in the gsp then you know graphs are totally wrong, they are just meant to look nice but return totally fake info.
Imagine the CPU load if querying all those servers for real and live

How should i know lol, im not really known with the financial part

well if you work for them you must know that, not to mention if thats big company the financial results are made public.
Anyway verygames been officially proclamed biggest gsp in europe

check the graphs mate, they have like 5000 players max during peek hours lol..
100.000 at i3d

whats sales amount in € for i3d.net ? Verygames made €900,000 in 2009