12/1/2023 0 Comments Naraka bladepoint steam charts![]() ![]() If I were Turtle Rock Studios reading this article about how Left 4 Dead 2 had more Steam players than Back 4 Blood for a period of time (ignoring that the latter is on three additional platforms not counted by Steam), I'd be pretty annoyed. We've seen an explosion in this reactive behavior on social media when fans, empowered by data and primed to dunk on something, present Steam Charts figures out-of-context to loudly proclaim a "dead game." Remember when Apex Legends, one of the biggest games around, supposedly died in 2020? Elden Ring, a game that you can finish, apparently " lost 90% of its concurrent players" in May.Ī more pervasive bad habit is the recent practice of presenting live player counts as a leaderboard. The same numbers once touted at launch become the watermark by which your game will always be measured. Concurrents tell a powerful story when you have a strong launch, but they're also a convincing fact-shaped weapon that fanbases wield to make demands or 'prove' a game is dying. ![]() The narrative about whether your game is popular or not is hugely important to maintaining player interest and developers probably don't want their own data to be used against them. I get the sense that companies are shy about their concurrents for the same reasons websites like this one don't have live pageview counters for all readers to see. (Image credit: Respawn Entertainment) Why the secrecy? At some point after that, Epic stopped getting specific and started sharing lifetime player milestones like everyone else. At the height of Fortnite’s popularity in 2018, Epic shared that it reached over 78 million players in a single month. We’ve also seen these honest (if braggadocious) user disclosures fizzle out as time goes on. Last year, Riot (which is 100% owned by Chinese tech giant Tencent) proudly proclaimed that Valorant, its PC exclusive FPS, had 14 million monthly active players. In April, Activision disclosed to investors that, while Call of Duty as a whole draws in over 100 million users every month, it actually lost 50 million users over 2021. ![]() When we do get real, useful numbers from a company, it's usually because it wants to share good news or is legally obligated to share bad news. And from developers, we typically get data based on proprietary definitions that can't be taken at face value. So to recap: from Steam itself, we get a stream of public data that is constant but incomplete, and masquerades as an accurate picture of a game's total health. ![]() And as those artificially-high numbers understandably tumbled, players quickly pointed to that data as evidence that bugs and other perceived issues were taking a toll on New World. But the disproportionate number of people waiting to play the game inflated New World's concurrency figure because an unusual number of people were keeping the game open for hours on end just to log in. A week after launch, New World made headlines when it peaked at over 900,000 concurrent players, the high point of any new game in 2021.Įven Amazon itself touted these numbers, with Jeff Bezos celebrating its popularity on Twitter three days after launch. When New World released, servers were crammed as tens of thousands had to wait in line to play. Steam stats are a great way to see a snapshot of what PC gamers are currently interested in, but they can paint a misleading picture. If you wanted to twist the truth, you could say that CS:GO, probably the most-played game on Steam of the last decade, has 'fallen dramatically' from its 1.3M peak in 2020 to a measly 586,000 average players this month. No game in the history of Steam has added players continuously since its launch. But any Wall Street analyst or economist would tell you that it is actually quite normal for numbers to go up and down. Checking Sea of Thieves’ page, I can see its community has climbed and dipped over the years with normal fluctuation and still attracts a healthy 17,000 simultaneous players daily on Steam-just 0.5% of that stated 30 million total, but still plenty of pirates to plunder.Īt some point in the service game craze, we started treating games like stocks. Third-party sites like Steam Charts use Steam’s freely available API to compile the data into historical graphs. Steam’s official stats page shares a live list of the top 100 most-played games at that moment. User tracking is a prerequisite to publish on Steam that not even the biggest publishers can get around. If I’m considering playing Sea of Thieves and want to know if there are still lots of people playing it right now, Rare's official stats aren’t much help.īetween every gaming platform, there’s only one that shares raw concurrent player data: Steam. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |