When’s the last time we had recycled PvE content? Season 2?

But seriously, game’s not dying, nor has it been dying for the last 4 years people have been saying that.

@pvekilla420 said in Steam numbers show the game is dying on platform:

@ninja-naranja this isn’t an argument… I’m posting figures which clearly shows the numbers dropping…

It could also be linked with the increasing popularity of Game Pass. People might just not be playing on Steam anymore. The only people with a full overview of player analytics are Rare.

@ninja-naranja said in Steam numbers show the game is dying on platform:

When’s the last time we had recycled PvE content? Season 2?

But seriously, game’s not dying, nor has it been dying for the last 4 years people have been saying that.

One could argue Seaforts are just easier skeleton forts on a new island against phantoms, but certainly the worst offender to recycled content, possibly ever, was Fort of Fortune
Overall I agree with you though, not trying to pick fights lol

@pvekilla420 said in Steam numbers show the game is dying on platform:

@ninja-naranja this isn’t an argument… I’m posting figures which clearly shows the numbers dropping…

Guess we'll have to go over this every four months...

---

Do games keep their player numbers?

No game keeps its player numbers at the launch reading. Some loose more than others.
We can see this trend with literally any popular game (with few exceptions) , SoT, GTA 5, RDR2,, Valheim.

---

Why does this happen?

Games tend to be more popular when they come out or re-release on new platforms. People want to experience the new and fresh game, or finally decide to buy an older game as they haven't wanted to bother getting it from another store.

This is why SoT had huge spike ones it was released on steam: people who didn't care enough and had bad experiences with MS store decided to finally try it out, thus inflating the all time high.

That is also why S3 saw such high spike. People, who hadn't been interested in SoT or hadn't played it before got introduced to it through PoTC cross over.

---

Why do games have spikes every now and then?

Usually players stop playing the game as they feel like they've had enough or feel as if there's nothing more for them, or nothing that enjoy.
When new updates come out (Especially with plenty of content) player numbers tend to spike as old players return to see what's new. Some stay with relighted flame for the game, while the others move on.

If there isn't much exciting content old players won't return. This may be the cause for recent ""low"" player numbers of SoT as devs have been enriching new players experience. Sitting and fireworks just aren't enough to keep the old dog excited. We might see a change in this with the teased PL voyage later this season.

Back to S3. Update brought in new tall tales which brought in plenty of old players to experience them and the story. The reason for why player numbers fell from 60k (on only steam might I remind) to 18k was that after 5 tales there was nothing to keep us into the game. The only thing that was added along side them were three new enemy types with ridicules spawn rate. So plenty of people (me included) toke a break from the game

Sometimes game is brought into popularity by popular content creators (Among us) but this tends to be more common with old popular games which have lost most of their players, or with fairly small games, such as previously mentioned Among us.

---

Should we worry about dropping numbers?

Not really. It's a part of every games cycle, they tend to loose players and gain them back, but will rarely reach the peak numbers or the glory days.

Developers create content "passively" which means that unless there're plenty of lay offs, or they spent plenty of time on something that never sees the light of the day (which is rare) they don't just spin their thumbs but create new assets. What this means is that if we haven't gotten plenty of content for a while, it's most likely due to them working on something grander.

---

Reminders

SoT's main platform is Xbox, of which player charts we have no access to. Devs have said in the past that... about 50% of players play on xbox (iirc?) which leaves the other half of being PC players, from who others play on MS store edition as it allows playing through game pass and has sold copy of SoT way longer than Steam has. In the best case scenario Steam players make up 25% of the player base, so keep that in mind in your calculations.

Secondly, If you want to blame on "lower popularity" of the game on removal of your beloved arena keep in mind that you'll have to provide some sort of support for that claim, not just numbers as there are multiple factors in play, of some I've brought up on this reply.
Arena saw 2% of the playtime spent in it. What this means is that unless people who never or rarely played it stopped due to its removal it isn't to be blamed for "low pp number" as it wouldn't have much of an impact. Even if it was, then why were the last few days of SoT peaking below S6, which hasn't provided much content as of now.

---

TL:DR

Games live, they loose players, they gains some, they all fade away eventually unless they manage to gather fan base of Tens if not Hundreds of millions (gta, csgo, dota, lol [mainly competitive games, maybe some people want to dream of being able to make a living by ruining their fingers one way or another?])

Steam player base is maybe 25% of the total player base.

Rare sees more data than we ever will. We are the last people who should help them decide how to run it.

There're multiple factors in play with player numbers, so using them is like telling how popular game is by looking at how many steamers there are on Twitch.

---

Random answers:

I don’t know why everyone is getting so angry at me for showing stats…

Because you don't seem to understand which data you use and how.

less and less numbers each month means it’s dying…

Depends on what you consider as "dead". For me that would mean that I can rarely find anyone to play with like SWBF2 on Oceanic servers (or so I've heard?) which is why I consider +40k active players as being no where near dead, at least until it reaches 5-8k platfrom wide.
If every game was "dying" ones its player numbers started to fall then almost all games would be considered "endangered", or could be staged as such.

I was asking the question why???

Luckily I've answered it somewhere up there.

I don’t know but one thing is sure… the game is becoming less played on steam…

Yes, you got that right.

if you also look at that data you can see there has been an almost 50% drop in player numbers from Jan 21 to Jan 22…. That is alot….

Firstly, static data is collected from longer time periods than days, depending on the subject. As an example, an areas normal climate is the average from past 30-years.
As games don't live that long you should look at maybe 1-2 years, but at the same time, there're so many factors in play it depends on what you want to find. +1-2y could be good if you wanted to tell which direction game has been going, but then you'll have to remember the player numbers, not just percentage as 50% drop may be devastating for a game with active playerbase of 100, compared to one with 100k.

Secondly: January 2022: Average players 15,721.6
January 2021 Average players 21,555.2

That's a loss of 27%, not 50%.

numbers don’t lie…

They don't as long as you interpret them correctly and don't just try to get them to back up your theory.

Why bring this up? Are you that upset over arena removal? And need something to blame in hopes rare will reverse there choice?

What about the Xbox numbers? Have they also dropped.

“Game is dying because (reason here)”

Rare right now; well, even if the game is dying.... WE MADE MILLIONS OFF OF IT YEAH BABY!!!!

Looking at the data, there are a few important things to note:

Average player numbers are about a third (33.3%) of what they were when the game launched on Steam in June of 2020. That is significant, however those numbers only lasted for about 2 months until they dropped. Several things to consider: this was during the summer, when many gamers have more time to play, it was also during the initial lockdown phase of a global pandemic, so more people were stuck at home at were looking at new games available. And any game added to a platform will have a large spike in the beginning.

Looking at average players over time, you can see that really the average is near 10-12 thousand players. There are usually spikes in the summer (see June/July 2020 vs June/July 2021) that then fall off back to that average of 1-12 thousand. An important thing to notice is if you look at March of last year, the number of average players is basically exactly the same. Peak players ebb and flow at about the same rate, having a jump when Pirates Life came out in June of 2021 and then falling back down to a more average peak player number. Are numbers down on Steam? Maybe a little, but they are for sure not down that much from average if you look at the cyclical nature of the player numbers.

The numbers dropping following Season 6's launch was obviously going to come from Steam Players that adored the Arena.

Personally I'm willing to marginalize most of Steam's playerbase as CS:GO rejects that like the piratical setting and just how upset they could make people in a game where even the free-est of beings will have something to complain about because of their preferences.

Ultimately they're not accurate to what the numbers on MS/Xbox are, which could arguably be more stable because of the ins and outs of Game Pass users enjoying their first month of Game Pass for $1.

If you want to make a point that people are willing to side with you on, don't focus on a single platform. Not everyone plays the game on that platform, it's just that Steam allows you to track player activity very easily in comparison to Microsoft.

I swear people use Steam Charts data as if it's holy scripture when declaring if a game is dying or not. I see posts like this at least once a month on the PlanetSide 2 subreddit, and that game is what one might call much closer to death than Sea of Thieves, yet it hangs on and is coming up on its 10th anniversary,

I agree player counts are down 50% on steam from this time last year.