Ozric
Volunteer Moderator
Yeah I mean who would do that
Is Elite Dangerous a dead game? I compared it to some others ...
- Thread starter Alien
- Start date
Umm .... I don't know what you mean, I totally would not do that ... much ... now ... since I saw I was wrongYeah I mean who would do that
They did, cant find the reference tho now - sometimes at the end of 2020 or beginning of 2021 they've said ED peaked 500,000 monthly players.
IF you check the best steam numbers (in terms of monthly average players) from that period and compare it with what we have now, you can extrapolate a number that can be quite in the ballpark, but my guesstimae is that value never dropped under 150k-200k not even in the worse months
That's different to what the CM said around odd launch. EDIT: Okay i just searched for it and found an OA video with 500000, yes a very different number to i think i remember 70k? Wheres stuartGT when you need him?
Well only for fun, would be interesting to know what the current number is.
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It is, and out of those, only those who have set their location to be public. That might be the default, but I'm not sure, and I'm not going to register a new account just to find out. 9,000 players on EDSM sounds too low though: the last time Anthor made traffic videos, which was 3.5 years ago, the total CMDR count displayed was 50,000.
In any case, a better check of activity is tracking EDDN; EDAstro has an excellent tracker here. You can see hourly statistics there, and keep in mind that EDDN reassigns all player IDs twice a day, to anonymize them. Which is the reason for the bumps on the hourly charts. Anyway, that's from all the sites which send player contributions to EDDN, not just one. (A lot of people use Inara though, which AFAIK doesn't handle system discoveries and such.)
As in most online games, only a small percentage of players upload data to third-party sites. You can see that here too, even if it's only the Steam charts that are available for comparison, and a lot of people don't use that. (FD have said so once too, but didn't say any numbers.) An interesting statistic though is that comparing Frontier's official numbers for how many systems were discovered at various points in time, then comparing that to how many of those systems were uploaded to EDDN, it's consistently around 40%. Meaning almost half of all systems are discovered by a minority of explorers, who are already a minority. In other words, those players who do share their finds with others tend to explore significantly more.
Well anyway, this was tangentially related, I'll let you guys get back to the main topic.
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Ozric
Volunteer Moderator
You don't get a choice in EvE because their API exposes everyone and everything.
Fair enough, corrected.
Personally I find it funny that they don't provide a complete break down on income from the game and what they are investing in new development. A complete head count by team would also not go amiss! I mean we do pay for it, so we do have a right to know what they are doing with our dosh...
Their dosh. Once we give it to them it's no longer our dosh. Sorry if that seems picky, but if it's no longer our dosh, we have no right to know what Frontier are doing with it.Personally I find it funny that they don't provide a complete break down on income from the game and what they are investing in new development. A complete head count by team would also not go amiss! I mean we do pay for it, so we do have a right to know what they are doing with our dosh...
I find it funny that a thread I started as a way of saying "The game's not as dead as I thought" has evolved into a discussion on player numbers, but that's the way this forum goes sometimes, and I wouldn't want to change it.
Maybe I should have added a /s
I don't understand the low player numbers in ED Astrometrics. Their statistics show a maximum of 1600 hourly commanders during the last 7 days, and about 1000 at the time I counted the total amount of 9000 in the EDSM Commanders map. Right now ED Astrometrics is showing the number 1056 unique commanders.
The player number reported depends on commanders actually reporting data, which only a minority does..
The only clear indication of whether or not a game is dead is probably is it making money (Elite is and has) and are the company that develop the game still providing regular updates (which they are). We already know based on years of data that space sim games are a niche market and don't have the appeal or say RPGs or FPS games. Just look at Elite 1980s and 1990s those games were popular but many other games had more appeal and sales. Doom for example!
As someone who's posted on these forums since day one we've had challenges to the longevity of the game for years. The thing is eventually those threads will be true Elite probably won't go on forever it'll either cease or Frontier will release a new product or version. Typically I think people that don't like Elite or those that end up disappointed post the dead stories.
I would strongly suggest this community considers the fact Elite is an alive game but Frontier won't ever develop on the speed or scale most of us want because at the end of the day the market isn't big enough warrant the cost. I play a lot of the NHL ice hockey games made by EA Games. A big developer but in terms of popularity no where near football Fifa or basketball NBA they still make the game but content and features come every few years rather than every release.
To close Frontier have stated daily numbers of in the tens of thousands across PC and Console which tallys up with EDSM commanders map Steam charts isn't accurate.
As someone who's posted on these forums since day one we've had challenges to the longevity of the game for years. The thing is eventually those threads will be true Elite probably won't go on forever it'll either cease or Frontier will release a new product or version. Typically I think people that don't like Elite or those that end up disappointed post the dead stories.
I would strongly suggest this community considers the fact Elite is an alive game but Frontier won't ever develop on the speed or scale most of us want because at the end of the day the market isn't big enough warrant the cost. I play a lot of the NHL ice hockey games made by EA Games. A big developer but in terms of popularity no where near football Fifa or basketball NBA they still make the game but content and features come every few years rather than every release.
To close Frontier have stated daily numbers of in the tens of thousands across PC and Console which tallys up with EDSM commanders map Steam charts isn't accurate.
Nice post, Alien.
If FD would stop bolting new half baked features on to the game and focus on fixing bugs and QOL issues, that would be great.It's simple: the Commanders map on EDSM also shows people who haven't sent in data (so, likely haven't played) recently. I don't know what the cut-off might be, but I clicked a few examples, and out of those already, I found one who last sent data on Dec. 26. Meanwhile, refer to my previous post about EDDN: you can't track unique players over that long time, by design.
Take a look at the other games in the first post, and tell me: other than EVE Online, how many of them have any official service that shows the actual number of players connected in real time?
The EDSM Commander's map has a (much) longer time window than the 1 hour step on EDAstro, but also requires more opt-in steps than the EDAstro numbers, so the two numbers aren't necessarily going to be related. And both require relatively rare opt-in steps, so it's pretty coincidental that they have the same number of digits, even!
EDSM says it has 85,112 flight logs, which represents a little under 1% of the total number of accounts created last time Frontier published that number (12 million, 2/3 of which were Epic giveaway ones). That's an all-time figure, though - some of those 85,000 won't have played for years. What proportion of those 85,000 are shown on the Commander's map and why, I don't know.
EDAstro ... well, EDDN seems to pick up about 5% of total activity on the occasions where you can compare it directly with an in-game figure, which probably represents less than 5% of players as the more active players are very likely more likely to be running 3rd-party desktop helpers. So if you multiply that number by at least 20 you might get something around the actual number of concurrent players ... but of course, you've no real way of telling how that changes hour-on-hour: is it 1000 people playing in Hour A and the same 1000 or a completely different 1000 playing in hour B. [1]
There are various ways to go from these bits of public activity information to estimates of total player numbers and they all end up giving figures in the low-to-mid hundred thousands on a monthly basis ... and that hasn't really changed that much since Odyssey released: there was a noticeable drop after Odyssey, but not a massive one.
End of 2020, specifically not including accounts created in the Epic giveaway, so the actual peak will probably be somewhat higher than that as most activity numbers did rise further in the lead-up to Odyssey.
[1] The biggest problem with using Steam stats is that "concurrent online" measures massively overestimate changes in "total player" numbers, both on the way up and the way down ... and this is probably a bigger source of error than "not everyone uses Steam" is! Steam figures have varied over a 4x range over the last few years, whereas most other activity indicators which don't rely on people being online at the same time rather than in the same week/month have varied by more like 1.5x or 2x (usually in the same direction; Steam is probably fine for estimating "going up" or "going down", just not for "how much?")
Or they could follow Egosoft's lead and do both!Nice post, Alien.