49 replies to this topic

[meteorol]

Ah, there it is.

The obligatory "OH MY GAWD I JUST CHECKED STEAM STATS!" thread. We should create a masterthread for that, were everyone can state how a F2P niche game shockingly loses players on steam after the initial release burst. Over and over again. With weekly updates.

It still does better than No Man's sky though. They managed to lose like 200.000 players in three weeks.

[Kotzi]

Its F2P, the whales are paying. Who cares. Not like a healthy playerbase would do any good, right?

Edited by Kotzi, 18 October 2016 - 11:33 PM.

[BLOOD WOLF]

Redwo1f, on 18 October 2016 - 12:53 PM, said:

...didn't realize it was this bad! They had 4 thousand and change players December 2015, and there has been a continual overall downward trend since then, till now where there is only 1 thousand and change players. That is only 25% of what they used to have. Wow.

Suggests that directions they have been taking have not gained new players nor been enough for many to keep playing.

...maybe a little less cash cow mech grabs and a little more substance needed...

The scientific community will not be pleased with your assesment.

Snowbluff, on 18 October 2016 - 09:12 PM, said:

Poor data analyst is poor data analyst.

The sudden drop of is to be expected, and the game has stabilized since then. For the past 4 months it has been more or less the same. It'll be like this for a while. Averaging 1000 players isn't too bad.

A minority of players use steam for their choice of launcher. Seems people want desperately to use steam as a medium but it's so flawed I don't even want to have the discussion again. If they do not get it, it is because they do not want to.

The best way to make an mean-average view of the data is to take the mean average views for the announcements. I believe it is safe to assume that most players just come to the forums to view whats going on with announcements. Obviously it is the stuff they want to hear, what changes are being made to the game. same with the energy draw PTS on September 1st. they are fooling themselves if anyone thinks otherwise

Edited by BLOOD WOLF, 19 October 2016 - 12:08 AM.

[Gattsus]

IMHO, when they finish ED or anything to replace ghost hest, will be the state at which MWO should have left the beta.

[Vellron2005]

Yeah.. It's what I've been saying for a few weeks now..

The game is declining, and dying slowly, but surely.. Long term.. it will die pretty soon.

More about that and how to potentially fix some of that in this controversial thread:

http://mwomercs.com/...-start-we-need/

I hope they get with the program and undestand that their survival as a company may be at stake..

[razenWing]

You guys act like it's a total shock that people come and go at a certain video game, and game eventually decline in popularity...

like, are you guys ten? are you sad that there are no santa claus?

COD: Flavor of the Year always release with some 3 million users. Within 6 months, that will drop to like 5000. O nos... everyone in Activision should go kill themselves with the 90% drop.

Sustainable 1000 is really good for a niche game with no marketing, believe it or not. You find me any other gaming studio with like 10 people that can accomplish this. Yea yea, game is dying. What game isn't? Just enjoy the ride and stop whining.
---------------------

PS This news came out yesterday:

http://www.polygon.c...ague-shuts-down

The Starcraft franchise pretty much started E-Sport, way before Dota and LoL. And look at it now... even gaming giants will fall with the passage of the time, flavor of the audience shifting, and other factors. And it's ok. When MWO go down the toilet, it will be fun to wait for MWO2, MW: Universe, MW 5, or whatever they might come up with next.

Edited by razenWing, 19 October 2016 - 02:48 AM.

[Hunka Junk]

Gattsus, on 19 October 2016 - 12:08 AM, said:

IMHO, when they finish ED or anything to replace ghost hest, will be the state at which MWO should have left the beta.

No, QP is beta. When they have a working endgame, then they leave beta.

[Steve Pryde]

BLOOD WOLF, on 19 October 2016 - 12:03 AM, said:

A minority of players use steam for their choice of launcher.

How do you know that? All people that I know switched to the steam client.

[Kotzi]

Why do you people keep comparing B2P with F2P. COD and Starcraft dont need money to keep the lights on.

[Mycrus]

Steve Pryde, on 19 October 2016 - 02:49 AM, said:

How do you know that? All people that I know switched to the steam client.

Shhh... dont break their cognitive dissonance..

[C E Dwyer]

Deathlike, on 18 October 2016 - 01:07 PM, said:

That's why they have been doing events all day every day.

They need you here... for some reason.

Been doing long events, because people asked for them, and they finally listened.

Rabid Imp, on 18 October 2016 - 09:51 PM, said:

well when all you do pretty much is make new mechs to sell and revamp maps then people get bored...

You mean like World of Tanks, arguably the most successful game of this type outside of East Asia. This game actually has more content than it, a campaign system that everyone can use, even solo people with limited success, not just a few elite a-holes, though people don't use it.

Now don't get me wrong I think there are places where PGI have made a complete Pigs ear of things, and some may never be fixed, because I don't think they're capable of fixing them, and I think F.W will never be balanced, and I think ED is not going to make the game better, and perhaps worse.

They have no clue how to balance mechs through their own quirk system. This month, like the last one and the month before that. I mean W.T.F they nerfed the jam chance of the 6DD and the Enforcer ! while leaving Mechs that are more powerful alone, Warhammer ballistic builds, Night Gyr ballistic builds, Kodiak Ballistic builds, Mauler ballistic builds, all with high mounts, untouched. Muromets pilots can feel nervous or relieved, maybe in November we find out ?

The big one is they lied about the complexity of the content, and that really I think is where most of the toxic comes from, all the content they promised is here, and people call it a placeholder FW being the big one.

FW will never be the mode we want it to be, because casuals won't use it, just like casuals don't use group play often, these changes won't populate it, only events with nice toys will, and then the forums will be full of it's not fair I was beaten by people using voip acting as a team.

The biggest enemy of this game is though the community. Don't get endless pages of nasty comments in world of tanks, vitrol and in some cases outright hate, the people doing it are lucky that the moderation here is so mild if many people making the kind of comments they do here, ( I've made plenty since closed beta myself) made them on a wargaming thread, they would be locked instantly, warned, and would be looking at a temp ban, and if it continued gone for good.

[vibrant]

Steve Pryde, on 19 October 2016 - 02:49 AM, said:

How do you know that? All people that I know switched to the steam client.

Because there's people like me. I started playing the game through Steam, but due to steam being incessantly annoying, I switched over to the standalone client. I know others who did to. We ourselves, and the people we know, don't represent everyone.

[Kotzi]

You just killed your own argument.

[feeWAIVER]

25% retention rate on steam is really good.

[Lehmund]

MauttyKoray, on 18 October 2016 - 06:09 PM, said:

-coughs-

You mean like EVERY OTHER new F2P game on steam? The numbers probably aren't exactly alike, but most F2Ps start with a large number of people and slowly dwindle to a more constant number.

Looking at the steam charts, it seems to me that MWO has followed a pretty standard trend as far as Steam goes. There is a standard decline in players like this because other games come out. It's a natural cycle.

In order to break the curve on Steam, MWO would need to introduce good "sale" items or new content offered as DLCs (free ones or paid ones), hence possibly getting further promotion through the Steam system.

If PGI would set up their mechpacks on there as DLCs somehow, they would get more sales and attention of new players. It's a reasonable marketing strategy. I hope PGI has reasons not doing this.

As far as non-steam client players are concerned, the curves behave the same way except those players don't expect something to occasionally go on sale visibly for their favorite games on occasion.

It has been a very long time since they last did a good promotion to new players I think. With the new changes upcoming to Faction Warfare, it may be a good time to do a nice push out to new players (Steam or otherwise) to put MWO back into people's minds as "new stuff to try out in this F2P game".

My 2 cents from a game dev industry expert.

[Primez]

Bilbo, on 18 October 2016 - 01:39 PM, said:

According to Russ' twitter, the pop has increased since summer. You can decide if you believe it or not. I've picked up many F2P games through Steam to check them out though, and I don't play any of them through Steam if there is another option. I don't see any reason to have an extraneous client running in the background.

As someone who hasn't been around till clans got released I came back to mwo and I didn't use the steam. Just the regular ole client. I do the same thing for apb.

[TLBFestus]

This is a bit off track but here I go anyhow. I asked this before, to no avail, but does anyone know how STEAM promotions work?

By that I mean, "Featured Games". Do you have to pay for it? Does STEAM choose who to promote, do they have to surrender more of a margin? How?

It's just that we have MWO on STEAM, yet other than the launch I have never, not once, not ever, seen any sort of promotion of the game on STEAM afterwards. Seriously?

Here PGI sits, with an average of 4-6 million players A DAY using STEAM, and they haven't taken advantage of the opportunity. So it's either "money" that they don't want to pay for the promotion or maybe they realize that their NPE is terrible, the effort is not worth it and they've decided they are happy remaining a niche game.

Edited by TLBFestus, 19 October 2016 - 12:03 PM.

[Kirkland Langue]

Players: "Matchmaker sucks, balance sucks, game is stale."
WhiteKnights: "Once we launch Steam, we'll get a lot more players and then the matchmaker will work correctly and we'll be launching a lot more content."
... one year later...
Players: "Matchmaker sucks, balance sucks, game is stale. Nobody stuck around from Steam and the only Content we get are new mechpacks"
WhiteKnights: "Steam Players never stick around, it's not MWO's fault that Steam Players are like that."

...




....

[Cy Mitchell]

Steam players have notoriously short attention spans. They simply have too many choices vying for their attention. PGI made some money and picked up a couple thousand new players some of whom may have never played a BattleTech or Mechwarrior game before. Mission accomplished.

The fact that a lot of the players tried the game and moved on is not surprising. It is expected.

Edited by Rampage, 19 October 2016 - 08:04 AM.

[Deathlike]

Cathy, on 19 October 2016 - 03:00 AM, said:

Been doing long events, because people asked for them, and they finally listened.

It's not that simple.

I suggest you track the number of events over time.

You never saw this many events back in beta. If anything, it was like an event a month or so.

Last year, we got approximately 2-3 events a month.

Events started happening a lot more since Steam and retention hasn't actually improved. Pretty much every weekend has had an event (and currently any large block of time).

The problem again still stems from a totally missing endgame... something that any player realizes is as important as everything else... and the game is totally devoid of it especially since the mega-swing-and-a-miss that this FW/CW Phase 3. You cannot sustain a game that has no ultimate purpose or goal indefinitely unless the game is that much fun...


Even by the end of this year... we'll likely to still be complaining about the game's faults... as if it hadn't changed since beta, let alone launch. It doesn't take much to understand the plight of this game... except for PGI themselves.

Edited by Deathlike, 19 October 2016 - 08:13 AM.