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Do Player Counts Matter? Player Population Trends Do Not Always Reveal The Big Picture

SystemSystem Member UncommonPosts: 12,599
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  • Slapshot1188Slapshot1188 Member LegendaryPosts: 17,651
    Consistency is more important than magnitude. Dramatic shifts have a negative impact on the game.
    SplattrScotSarla

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  • TheocritusTheocritus Member LegendaryPosts: 10,014
    It only matters to me if we have to group in the game....If it's a single player game, co-op or solo centered MMO then the player count does not matter to me...I know alot though to whom it does matter...They will only play if many people are playing...This is why influencers and twitch gamers make so much money because companies know these guys will bring in the sheep.
  • AsturiosAsturios Member UncommonPosts: 47
    Rating a game on Steam current Players is still a better way to judge a Game then Judging based of Twitch Views like many ppl do nowadays........

    And in MMOs i think its not that bad to atleast see if its worth playing if an MMO is dead and thats why you cant even play the endgame at its fullest why even bother.

    But then many MMOs are not only Steam related playerbases like Neverwinter for instance many ppl play via the ARC Launcher ... TESO is the same i guess ? i never rly played TESO activly but when i tested it it had a Launcher besides Steam.
  • WarWitchWarWitch Member UncommonPosts: 351
    When a game drop below 200 online I do get worried, like Elyon.
    Big Dumbed downed games 3 buttons NW etc I hardly consider a game.
    Old school games can still be awsome and fun to play STO ESO GW2 etc and can surive the new girl on the block effect well.

    I mainly ask myself am i having fun? If so keep trucking till they close the door.
    Alomar
  • UngoodUngood Member LegendaryPosts: 7,534
    The idea of "Player count" is a throw back to Sub based games where every player mattered.

    With the new age Cash Shop/F2P games, only the paying players matter, and everyone else is just content filler.

    However, to the surprise to no one, the content fillers, don't like the idea that they don't really matter anymore, and thus still try to use player count as a metric to show that just being a warm body in the game has significance.

    I mean, player count is cool to know, but overall, it's just not as big a metric as it used to be, as there are other far more important metrics to game survival these days.
    MendelRaagnarzAlomar
    Egotism is the anesthetic that dullens the pain of stupidity, this is why when I try to beat my head against the stupidity of other people, I only hurt myself.

  • DattelisDattelis Member EpicPosts: 1,675
    I believe player count is important to a point, since you'll always need to have people to do stuff with regardless of how 'solo'-minded mmorpgs become. As has been seen with FFXIV though, it tailed WoW for a while and Yoshida ever tried to deter people from constantly playing if they didn't want to, but they also had a back-up plan to increase monetization of the game. So success doesn't always boil down to big populations.
    UngoodRidelynn
  • AlpiusAlpius Member UncommonPosts: 247
    For me, I use player counts to judge whether or not it's worth it to try a game out at first. If the player count is low and the game is relatively new, then there's a higher chance of it not lasting and a higher chance of it being shut down. What's the point of jumping into a game just to lose everything you've done in it?
  • MendelMendel Member LegendaryPosts: 5,609
    Ungood said:
    The idea of "Player count" is a throw back to Sub based games where every player mattered.

    With the new age Cash Shop/F2P games, only the paying players matter, and everyone else is just content filler.

    However, to the surprise to no one, the content fillers, don't like the idea that they don't really matter anymore, and thus still try to use player count as a metric to show that just being a warm body in the game has significance.

    I mean, player count is cool to know, but overall, it's just not as big a metric as it used to be, as there are other far more important metrics to game survival these days.

    I still put a good deal of stock in Player Counts.  Some unknown subset of those will be paying players, even in Cash Shop/F2P games.  Even those not paying a cent are "Potential customers" that the company could eventually be turned into paying customers.  (Too bad the only real mechanisms companies have for converting prospects into revenue are 'wallet' gates - pay to continue.  It isn't my problem that game companies fail to recognize the F2P players as prospective customers and have such limited imagination in developing ways to capture them.  Basic business).

    The bigger issue for me is if there are enough people around at any given time to help/talk/group/buy/sell.  A sparse population, even in B2P games, forces the player to be more self-reliant.  A *reliable* Player Count can provide that information.  Finding a reliable source of information tends to be the real problem.



    RaagnarzUngood

    Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.

  • user298user298 Member UncommonPosts: 152
    "Do player counts matter" - yea, they absolutely do matter for me. If the in-game's world feels "deserted", especially during the time of the day I am able to play the game (which may not be the same time of the day as most others want to play the game at) then it's highly likely I will consider to quit playing this game very soon (especially if a game has a greedy, unfair monetization like "mandatory monthly fee") and there will be much less incentive for me to spend extra money on cosmetic items through in-game shop (if others can't see my cosmetic items - there's no rational reason for me to spend money on them, I might just use free third-party client-side cosmetic mods instead or none at all). The whole reason I play MMOs is to have a LARGE pool of ACTIVE players to choose from when doing things like open world PvP (if a game has it) or casual socialization or even doing basic things like leveling alternative class/job through dungeon queue system.

    Of course, there are some details to consider like how many active players there are per each server out of total amount and how large the in-game world is, so I generally don't look at Steam's statistics, especially for games which many people play through a dedicated non-Steam launcher. But still, the player count is very important to me, because number of active players is the primary source of fun for me in any type of MMO.
  • UngoodUngood Member LegendaryPosts: 7,534
    Mendel said:
    Ungood said:
    The idea of "Player count" is a throw back to Sub based games where every player mattered.

    With the new age Cash Shop/F2P games, only the paying players matter, and everyone else is just content filler.

    However, to the surprise to no one, the content fillers, don't like the idea that they don't really matter anymore, and thus still try to use player count as a metric to show that just being a warm body in the game has significance.

    I mean, player count is cool to know, but overall, it's just not as big a metric as it used to be, as there are other far more important metrics to game survival these days.

    I still put a good deal of stock in Player Counts.  Some unknown subset of those will be paying players, even in Cash Shop/F2P games.  Even those not paying a cent are "Potential customers" that the company could eventually be turned into paying customers.  (Too bad the only real mechanisms companies have for converting prospects into revenue are 'wallet' gates - pay to continue.  It isn't my problem that game companies fail to recognize the F2P players as prospective customers and have such limited imagination in developing ways to capture them.  Basic business).

    The bigger issue for me is if there are enough people around at any given time to help/talk/group/buy/sell.  A sparse population, even in B2P games, forces the player to be more self-reliant.  A *reliable* Player Count can provide that information.  Finding a reliable source of information tends to be the real problem.



    This is a point that was brought up a long time ago on the DDO forums, and they called this something like Population Threshold.

    What this meant, was that once the population dwindles to the point that there are not enough people to keep the activities in the game going, the game has dropped below it's threshold, and thus ceases to be playable by the remaining population.

    Ergo, this is when it dies, even if it has players, they can't do the content, so they have little to no choice but to also leave.

    This is, how do I say it, a shadow reason, I guess, why a lot of games focus on small group, solo content, it's not because casuals love it or some bullshit, and while they do, which is great, the reality from a design standpoint, is that it allows for a much lower population threshold.

    This might also be why some gamers subconsciously try hard to push larger scale content in games, because doing so, makes their warm body role, more viable to the overall survival of the game. They are making the large scale content doable by the paying players.

    While this is not a bad view, a lot of gamers think way to highly of this role overall, and as opposed to realizing they are glorified NPC's, they think they are keeping the game afloat.

    But reality check is that, the only thing keeping a game alive are the people that are continually fiscally supporting it, if that group leaves, regardless of how much or little of the population they make up, it does not matter how many other players remain and still play the game, it's dead.

    This is why overall population numbers are not nearly as important as revenue per individual player, the more each player pays into the game, the more each player is worth.

    Equally so, knowing what percent of the population is actively fiscally supporting the game, is also very important, if that number is only in the 10%, that means 90% of the population has no bearing on the continual survival of the game. Which is something that every gave developer should know about their own game.

    Why is this important.

    Well, because as you said, if they cannot find a way to turn the free players into paying players, they need to find a way to kiss their playing players ass, and not allow them to leave. What this means, is they will start to make design choices that can very well piss off 90% of their population, and not give a shit, as long as it makes that 10% happy, or happier, as the case may be.

    Now this is one of things I personally love about DDO, is that they sell content packs, and this means, each individual player generates more revenue by buying those packs, and what this means, is that each player overall, matters more to their bottom line, then if they sold some Loot Boxes to whales and made a game where 10% support the 90%, and the dev's ultimately just have to guess who wants what, praying to RNGesus that they don't screw things up.
    cheyaneSplattrKidRiskMendel
    Egotism is the anesthetic that dullens the pain of stupidity, this is why when I try to beat my head against the stupidity of other people, I only hurt myself.

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  • vegetableoilvegetableoil Member RarePosts: 768
    Player count always mattered, especially in a socially interacted game like an MMO. people who said "we can keep the whales" to support a game are completely mistaken. if a game lack player the whales will leave eventually unless it has a cult follower type of whales who can support the entire division of engineers, and engineers are not cheap, not by a long shot.
  • cheyanecheyane Member LegendaryPosts: 9,404
    edited May 2022
    I feel that from playing on Homecoming servers in City of Heroes that even a small population can give you the full grouping experience if the game is designed in such a way as to allow for fun grouping with no real forcing of it.

    I don't think it is necessary to have a large population to have fun in a game. Unfortunately the trend does not support this because players only play games with large populations. However smaller populations tend to support a game better in that they pay and support the game because they don't want it to die. Of course the F2P players show the game is popular but they don't support the game monetarily. Strictly speaking they are there to give the illusion the game is healthy. They clock longer hours therefore are more visible because they have to grind longer to not pay.

    I feel if players weren't so flighty a game that has a paying, loyal player base is best for a game if  you want the game to be there for a longer time. Plus it also increases the bots when the game has too many players. These days with F2P these large populations are meaningless because the F2P will leave to play the next new thing.

    The truth is whales need the F2P people to show off to. So to them populations are an important metric.

    What games need are loyal players that support and pay for the game. So players populations mean zilch to me.
    UngoodScot
    Garrus Signature
  • MonsutaManMonsutaMan Member UncommonPosts: 49
    Revenue matters.

    Regardless how you get it. You can have far less players than WoW, but a bunch of whales as your playerbase.
  • IselinIselin Member LegendaryPosts: 18,719
    Wargfoot said:
    I think New World going from 913,000 players to 20,000 in a few months cannot be hand-waved away as merely the new shiny wearing off. If they'd dropped even to 100,000 players, I could buy that line but 20K is just ridiculous. Keeping only 2% of your players for a few months is terrible.

    If they have 40,000 players 6 months from now that would be an indication that they're starting to do something right.

    It is a title worth saving - and honestly, with so few players they've room to experiment some - I hope they pull it together.



    It's like the infamous Tortage bait and switch but done on grand scale.

    The game presents itself as a casual friendly world and reinforces that initial presentation for the first 20 levels or so but then it starts to morph into the decidedly casual unfriendly game it really is and just gets worse and worse until you finally get to see it for what it is at level 60+.

    I know that it's a cliche to talk about needing to put in more hours in a game before you can truly judge it and we often make fun of people who say things like "I put 400 hours into this game and this is why it's a POS!" But strangely enough, in New World that would be fair.

    It's like the PvE veneer falls off and you eventually reach the "aha!" moment when you get the fact that no they really did not change this from a PvP game to a PvE one when they added flagging instead of Open World PvP everywhere, Yeah they changed that part of it but the core game loop that drives this game for better or worse is unchanged: "Grab territory through PvP WARs, defend territory through PvP wars and , attack neighbor's territory in PvP wars" is 100% the game play loop and everything flows into that and depends on it. You'd better love the living shit out of that activity and all of its associated guild v. guild drama if you plan to make this your long term home.

    This is why the population still hasn't stabilized. People are leaving not in a forum's public tantrum over screwed up this or that or bad implementation of this or that. Some drama queens do, sure, but the main attrition is happening when players reach however many hours it took for them to reach that "aha!" moment and see the game for what it truly is.

    That true game appears to be so unappealing at a fundamental fun level that there is no end to the loss of players once the early game veneer wears off.
    UngoodReaperUkKyleranScotAlomar
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  • UngoodUngood Member LegendaryPosts: 7,534
    edited May 2022
    Iselin said:
    Wargfoot said:
    I think New World going from 913,000 players to 20,000 in a few months cannot be hand-waved away as merely the new shiny wearing off. If they'd dropped even to 100,000 players, I could buy that line but 20K is just ridiculous. Keeping only 2% of your players for a few months is terrible.

    If they have 40,000 players 6 months from now that would be an indication that they're starting to do something right.

    It is a title worth saving - and honestly, with so few players they've room to experiment some - I hope they pull it together.



    It's like the infamous Tortage bait and switch but done on grand scale.

    The game presents itself as a casual friendly world and reinforces that initial presentation for the first 20 levels or so but then it starts to morph into the decidedly casual unfriendly game it really is and just gets worse and worse until you finally get to see it for what it is at level 60+.

    I know that it's a cliche to talk about needing to put in more hours in a game before you can truly judge it and we often make fun of people who say things like "I put 400 hours into this game and this is why it's a POS!" But strangely enough, in New World that would be fair.

    It's like the PvE veneer falls off and you eventually reach the "aha!" moment when you get the fact that no they really did not change this from a PvP game to a PvE one when they added flagging instead of Open World PvP everywhere, Yeah they changed that part of it but the core game loop that drives this game for better or worse is unchanged: "Grab territory through PvP WARs, defend territory through PvP wars and , attack neighbor's territory in PvP wars" is 100% the game play loop and everything flows into that and depends on it. You'd better love the living shit out of that activity and all of its associated guild v. guild drama if you plan to make this your long term home.

    This is why the population still hasn't stabilized. People are leaving not in a forum's public tantrum over screwed up this or that or bad implementation of this or that. Some drama queens do, sure, but the main attrition is happening when players reach however many hours it took for them to reach that "aha!" moment and see the game for what it truly is.

    That true game appears to be so unappealing at a fundamental fun level that there is no end to the loss of players once the early game veneer wears off.
    I hate games like this.

    Where they try to pass off that they are one way, when they really are not, just such bullshit.

    If you made a game one way, Own that like you Own that.. those that want to play it, will flock to it, those that won't, will stay away.

    What do they really think was going to happen, that a bunch of PvE Casuals were suddenly going to love some Hardcore PvP.. this studio seems hell bent to make every single mistake they can make.
    Egotism is the anesthetic that dullens the pain of stupidity, this is why when I try to beat my head against the stupidity of other people, I only hurt myself.

  • DigDuggyDigDuggy Member RarePosts: 694
    I think people are way to obsessed with whether a game goes up or down in population.  Especially big budget games launches.  It's like people read from a twisted MMO complainers guide for forums.  Numbers do matter but it's all game dependent.  Some games require more population to continue operations, some games feel empty without a certain threshold.   Sometimes there are reasons for dips that have nothing to do with popularity, but other factors beyond the games control and may or may not be temporary.  People need to look at the game and not some blanket standard that just sounds silly when they get brought up sometimes.

  • SaruomoSaruomo Member UncommonPosts: 140

    Wargfoot said:

    I think New World going from 913,000 players to 20,000 in a few months cannot be hand-waved away as merely the new shiny wearing off. If they'd dropped even to 100,000 players, I could buy that line but 20K is just ridiculous. Keeping only 2% of your players for a few months is terrible.



    If they have 40,000 players 6 months from now that would be an indication that they're starting to do something right.



    It is a title worth saving - and honestly, with so few players they've room to experiment some - I hope they pull it together.










    Such a dumbass thing to say. Valheim is the exact same, went from over half a million to around the same numbers as NW in an even shorter time.
    Kyleran
  • SaruomoSaruomo Member UncommonPosts: 140
    WoW and FFXIV feel much more deserted than NWdoes, both chat and open world.
    ExsirasAlomar
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  • ArgyxArgyx Newbie CommonPosts: 1
    edited May 2022
    "Both New World and Final Fantasy XIV share similar player counts these days but you will find drastically different opinions within each community. "

    Yet, you made the point that FFXIV isn't a Steam exclusive, so not really similar counts. Also, if you did the comparison the last 30 days you would see New World has been consistently lower (FFXIV being 50% more)...even on just Steam counts alone.

    FFXIV shut down new sales and free trial accounts on December 2021 to manage player counts. Sales returned in late January. It's a mature, popular MMO that generates continual income through subscriptions and store items (including the option to skip over 100 hours of story scenes). New World was a survival game turned MMO.

    I've played New World, Lost Ark, and FFXIV over these last few months. While New World might not be dead, it's definitely lost.
    Post edited by Argyx on
    Kyleran
  • NovaRyuNovaRyu Member UncommonPosts: 31
    I don't know about mmo's population, but stupid articles like this are why this website is dying. A simple Google search will tell you FFXIV daily logins and total subscriptions both passed wow over a year ago. Do a little research and stop using a silly statistic like "concurrent steam users" to compare when the vast majority of players don't play the game through steam.

    Do better MMORPG.co. This article comes across as you guys don't understand the domain you are named after.
    KyleranVidahr
  • AngrakhanAngrakhan Member EpicPosts: 1,839
    Wow... a whole article basically devoted to white knighting New World's population nose dive. Seems like this should maybe be a forum post, not a front page article? I guess I struck a nerve with my comment in the New World thread boasting about their upcoming features.

    Anyway, at the end of the day for New World it does matter because without players the main features of the game fall apart. Upkeeping a town falls apart. Sieges fall apart. The whole territory control concept falls apart without enough players to move the needle.

    There's other games that have a different design that don't require as many players. Destiny 2, and The Division come to mind which are online games that due to their instanced design could operate perfectly fine with a small player base. I'm sure folks can think of others. However, New World is not one of those games, sorry.
  • eoloeeoloe Member RarePosts: 864
    These days I wonder if I should go back to Naraka or not. First action: check the player count. It was around 20K: ok check!

    In multiplayer games (MMORPGs or not), I always check the player count. No point of playing a multiplayer game that has no population.

    But sometimes a reasonable amount is enough, and stability/retention over time is really what matters.

    I played MWO for years and the player count was going between 1000 down to 600. Never a problem to find a game, the community was really dedicated.

    I also currently chill on PSO2:NGS. Player count? ~3K: for a MMO it is not much but the numbers are the same since almost a year. That' s good enough.



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