https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87dH1H-jF2w
I found watching this fascinating, doing some maths autism on the games market again but looking at the searches and comparing it to the steam data makes you think. The keyword searches are probably a fairly accurate gauge of interest in these games because even with botting it's probably going to account for people looking up things like guides for the games and generally searching it up.
As opposed to steam where yes, people will buy the game in question but then it will be dead as anything if you actually log into the multiplayer or you find it's completely broken and there's something deeply suspicious about the reviews.
Pirate metrics get even more interesting, granted, the pirates will potentially be on the lower player count compared to everybody else just because of the barrier of entry and how most normies etc. are going to go through steam. One thing I did was look at the fitgirl rankings ( I love I can talk about this without getting banned lol ) GTA V still seems to be on top, that's probably the modder community. Other titles you don't really see all that much in the rankings by comparison too.