I think it aligns with the strategy of pretending to be bigger than you are so you can attract business customers.
An old startup I worked at used customer IDs in communications that started from an arbitrary 5 digit number to give a false impression of our customer base.
similarly it's used to be super common to get checkbooks starting with a higher check number cause some places were cautious of taking check #1 from someone assuming they didn't have any sort of credit history.
That was really common among shareware developers back in the day, one guy sort of pretending to be a big serious company. I suspect Tim Sweeney was joining this trend but also mocking it with the name "Epic MegaGames".
It's definitely not how people act these days, at least with indie/solo game developers.
Maybe some portion of the 2000 organic players were also running bots?
I ran some personal bots back in the Diablo 2 days with D2Loader and some shareware bot plug-in I bought on a shady site for like $12 in ~2003-2004 or so. Wish I could remember the name.
Apparently there are modern versions of D2Loader type software. I haven’t really followed the game or the bot scene much these days, but I like the cat and mouse game in general across the physical and virtual space. Red teaming scratches that itch I guess.
Another angle I've seen is different types of id numbers within an organization start with a different digit, even if they're all the same length. The CRM system doesn't care, but it prevents mixups on the human side
An old startup I worked at used customer IDs in communications that started from an arbitrary 5 digit number to give a false impression of our customer base.