So ... the 1,000 names will be Drake, Jak, Blackfish, Crow, oXYnary, Knightmare, Olligo, djc9739, Yasutaka, Fatal Vapor, Serpiente, Rayts5, Tak, etc. and etc.

Joy.

Yeah, that isn't going to happen. This guy is just assuming.

we already know f**kface and boobies made the list, so what did you expect?

You would name your character in New Vegas djc9739? He's talking about player-character names from the games themselves, not steam usernames.

THANK YOU, Box Maaan!

Edit:

As an example, I usually play 3 types of character through a Beth game

My dumb tank is normally named Tubig;

My charismatic type is usually named Blythe;

My sneaky assassin is called Vespers.

So Valve queries the saved files in my account and even though I have 30 or so saved games there are only three unique names.... so it counts one each for Tubig, Blythe and Vespers.

Now it does the same for all of the save files for all other accounts and compiles a master list of which I can single out the top 1000 most popular

Nothing to do with steam usernames or real life names

steam is only a very small part of the fan base, so I'm not sure why they would use that method. Even if there weren't countless popular baby name sites and books out there. There are databases of the most popular names for any particular year, pretty much going back a hundred years or so. Ask any parent, or soon to be parent. Seems like a lot of unnecessary work, which would at best allow them to only glean a small amount of gamer names.

So Prisoner will also be possible

what year did [censored] and boobies (Or Katniss) crack the top 1000 baby names?

1000 is a lot of names... and players throw in a lot of spelling variations to appear a little different even though it is really the same sounding name in spoken dialogue (like Crowe and Crow mentioned earlier in the thread.) Add in that you are talking 1000 pronunciations that probably covers 2000 to 3000 spellings you are hitting a majority of the player base

I am betting at least 70% of gamers favor at least one of the top 1000 (pronounced) pc names. People aren't really as unique statistically as they like to think they are.

edit: A large part of my job involves writing queries for data-mining extremely large databases. A query like this is NOT a lot of trouble (10 minutes, tops) and Valve probably offers data-mining for statistical purposes (like this) as part of its contract for hosting the file library.

I don't know. Lately all my character names have been Nordic. In fact I've never used a real NA household name for a PC I don't think. Maybe they do ... or maybe they are all just variations of f**kface.

While there are bound to be some goof names in there, I highly doubt it will be a large number.
What they have said is that they recorded around 1000 of the most popular names.
That info is out there already. Perhaps they had to do some collating to factor in different countries, and make the SW so it knows the different spellings of each name, but that info is already out there too. Independent of Steam. (not sure why steam would the 'the' gamer sourced metric they'd use if they went that route at any rate}

Sites like http://www.babynames.com/Names/Popular/index.php?y=2001 are everywhere.

Then you are likely in luck... a good portion of the Nordic god/goddess names are very popular PC names... as are many of the Nordic hero names

The African American Male that will be my first character build will be named Cyrus. I'm more than certain it will be a spoken name as Redguard is Todd's baby. I always make a redguard or african-american male named Cyrus in every Bethesda game, heck my main pc in Skyrim was named Cyrus.

I do it because I loved Redguard and Cyrus the character. I want to keep my favorite character alive. Though, I tend to just use his name and likeness rather than doing a full blown rp of Cyrus the character.

I'd be totally interested to hear the backstory of how Cyrus from Redguard ended up in Post-Apocalyptic North America. No snark, I really like clever stories!

Yes but I gave them Nordic names because they were Nords. I don't think the SS will be a Nord. See whenever I play I like to role-play so I generally do a lot of research on the naming conventions of the game world and try to stick to them. The sole exception is naming my Khajiit Tigger because of reasons ... well and sometimes I name them Katt so when the NPC's call my character a Cat it sounds like they are calling him/her by name ... which oddly enough brings me back to really wanting my character's name heard in FO4.

I find my character names as I create them. It is for this reason I disliked the Dragon Age: Inquisition character creation.

Look at the newly created face and say to it ."Now then, what is your name?"

One dear to me says "What's the default face? Default name? And we're off."

laughs out loud

Todd Howard fan? grins and thumbs up.

My guess is they're drawing mainly from a list of the most popular baby names plus a few from popular culture and Fallout culture. Safest bet would be to use your own first name, assuming it's a regular name popular in the Western Hemisphere.