The current marketing practice which was imported by the chinese is to bot the living shit out of their games with puppet accounts and try to shame people socially for not playing these games.
This is mistaking what a player count metric would ostensibly represent, actual player interest, turning it into basically worthless garbage data, like youtube view and like counts, or the Steam Hardware survey.
The vaguely comes with the idea that you can berate random people online that they're somehow a weirdo and maybe squeeze a couple hundred sales out of a failed game.
This generally doesn't work on actual human /v/ users because there's no incentives here to pretend to care about terrible games