Thank you, but I think you missed my point...
2.1 generated very little interest on Steam. Player numbers still in the dirt.
- Thread starter 4Corvus
- Start date
No, i didn't, but it's ok.
I think steamcharts said us the game is dead about 36 times now.
Because everyone plays this game through Steam....... oh wait!
Now, I'll admit that I don't check this stat all that often, it's probably been about 6 months since the last time I took a peek, but I know that that is 2 million more concurrent users than 6 months ago. Knowing as much as I do about the analytics behind steam stats I can comfortably say that that translates into another 12 million new users.
So.... 12 million new people on Steam. How many bought Elite: Dangerous?
About 30,000... Not all that impressible considering this was the entire period of Horizons launch.
ED has a bad name on Steam. Reviews and owner satisfaction are actually getting worse as time goes on, and FDev's cute little spin-off, Elite: Dangerous Arena which is the price of a gastrointestinal disaster from McDonalds, has only sold 12,000 copies.
People love to rag on the Steam crowd, saying they have short attention spans and are in it for the pew pew and gone as soon as that gets old. If that's the case then Arena is right up their alley. Yet this game has so far sold 5 times as many copies.
[video=youtube;63hDhFcbam0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63hDhFcbam0[/video]
Hmmm.... Seems to be an issue....
Where are these players you speak of?
Its like rare earth syndrome out there.
The game is built on solitude mechanics, its the new "thing" online...
No meta, no "fear", no long term game. The AI is testing to very annoying at best.
Its like rare earth syndrome out there.
The game is built on solitude mechanics, its the new "thing" online...
No meta, no "fear", no long term game. The AI is testing to very annoying at best.
Last edited:
I know Steam is very convinient tool for games distribution, but if you'll get even deeper into the numbers you'll realize still there are very little gamers using the platform. To be honest I have no idea why it is like this. I like it very much personally, though I have bought Elite Dangerous way before it was released on Steam...
Look..., comparing to numbers mentioned by you (very well prepared post btw!
) to this, the Steam players' base is still almost "nothing": List of best-selling video games.I know Steam is very convinient tool for games distribution, but if you'll get even deeper into the numbers you'll realize still there are very little gamers using the platform. To be honest I have no idea why it is like this. I like it very much personally, though I have bought Elite Dangerous way before it was released on Steam...
Look..., comparing to numbers mentioned by you (very well prepared post btw!
Nnnnot quite.
Counting Tetris' sales over the course of more than 2 decades and 20 platforms is not the same as counting the sales of one platform. Specifically because you're looking at a platform, and not a game.
Steam has 125 million active users as of February. Compare that to the Playstation 4 which has shipped 40 million units. This is comparing platform to platform. The only platform that was more widespread was the Playstation 2, which took 11 years to sell 155 million units, which does not translate to 155 million active units. The number of active units was only a small fraction of that at the time of the console's discontinuation.
If you count handhelds then the Nintendo DS is right behind the PS2 with 154 million units, largely because Nintendo made some 3,786 different versions of it and numpties were collecting them like poke-candy.
Steam has moved 1.86 billion game copies, 600 million of those were in the last year. If you want to find similar numbers for the PS4 or XB1 you'll have to count each game individually. I can help you out by saying neither one will add up to 10% of this though.
PC gaming is the largest active market in the industry right now along with being the fastest growing and the highest grossing, and Steam dominates it. If you aren't doing well on Steam you aren't doing well period.
Sell a copy of Elite: Dangerous to 1 out of every 100 active users on Steam and you've doubled the number of copies sold to date on that platform. That's not an unrealistic goal for Developers of FDev's caliber, is it?
I don't use the steam version of this game and I bet most other folks don't either.
I don't use steam for ED, so OP post is mute.
I don't play a lot admittedly, as some gang of rouges dragged me on distant worlds and am now finding it hard to get the motivation to get back.
Steam is good for hot air that's all.
Ah, that's why EA, Bethesda, Ubisoft, and half a dozen other companies, many of them with annual budgets in the hundreds of millions, are trying to mimic Steam, because it's a complete failure....
If I did not trust FD I would not have put thousands of euros in there banks.
I am aware that I am but one backer , but in genral the backers want a deep and complex game , just look at the DDF (I am sadly only a beta backer , but I still looked a lot at the DDF)
It doesn't matter thayt many players are not using steam, the point is that the trend in data almost certainly IS representative of the wider community - the Steam players are fading away slowly, there was a fairly obvious drop in players from the new year onwards (I'd tend to see that as a reaction to Horizons, which seems odd but I can't think of anything else, except New Year resolutions to cut back on gaming, that occurred back then) and a small uptick that lasted hardly any time at all when the 2.1 update went live. That might well represent people coming back to give it another go, then leaving as they got creamed by the AI, or simply deciding they don't like engineers or something...but the problem is they didn't apparently stick around very long.
Argue all you like that this just represents Steam players, but that's a substantial number of people across all sorts of demographics, and the trend in Steam player data is unlikely to differ markedly from non-Steam player data, so this is quite worrying in that we aren't seeing development updates like 2.1 doing anything to attract more players.
There is no point in our getting self righteous about this, the die hard fans are not, alone, enough to keep the game going, the game needs new customers and it needs updates to attract them - there's no point in developing updates if they have no effect on the numbers buying into the game....the people who bought into Horizons need to be retained, so they'll want to buy the next season of updates.
Dave
Argue all you like that this just represents Steam players, but that's a substantial number of people across all sorts of demographics, and the trend in Steam player data is unlikely to differ markedly from non-Steam player data, so this is quite worrying in that we aren't seeing development updates like 2.1 doing anything to attract more players.
There is no point in our getting self righteous about this, the die hard fans are not, alone, enough to keep the game going, the game needs new customers and it needs updates to attract them - there's no point in developing updates if they have no effect on the numbers buying into the game....the people who bought into Horizons need to be retained, so they'll want to buy the next season of updates.
Dave
Last edited:
This is a strawman.
The issue isn't how many players are or are not using Steam, because that's active players. Active players using Steam still makes up a decent chunk of the player base, and that's the problem.
Because the rest of those 700,000 accounts are dead.
Last edited:
I have lots of games on steam and it has its good and bad points, but it is no way the defining account for ED.
Its a self published game and I fully support that therefore to show my support I login through FD account, why let them take 30% of profit is it just so you can be on steam?
I am not saying steam is bad its just not my cup of tea when it come to FD and ED.
Last edited:
When Horizons was released, steam was all sorts of messed up. It was faster and easier to re-download everything stand alone than to wait for steam to get their ducks in a row. After that, why would you go back? I would be willing to bet gold for spit the majority of those 3000 players are new players after 2.0 launched.