I prefer not to think I'm playing a game that is associated with steam users.. Spend a few mins on any steam forum to find out why.
Discussions about Steam Charts
- Thread starter babelfisch
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I prefer not to think I'm playing a game that is associated with steam users.. Spend a few mins on any steam forum to find out why.
Difficult to know really. I have steam, but have never used ED through steam. There are also a large amount of players that did buy it through steam, but now don't use steam. It's impossible to know for sure where the majority of the player base is. It could be that the people that bought the game via the FDev store are be more hardcore players and most of them are still playing.
Not constantly bombarded by other shiny new games to play either, like Steam users. ^.^
Yes, good post
The thing is, average play time per player did change from 15 to 24 hours in the last 2 weeks alone. Sadly the data for release isn't available anymore but it's clear that average play time isn't constant
http://steamspy.com/app/359320
(click on audiende 2 weeks)
It all depends on the granularity of time you/one use for counting.
And we had sales in the near past, was it 1 week go? So maybe, after some delay of installing and getting into it, mastering the controls and everything, numbers are increasing.
The playtime on steamspy is not the playtime I meant (and you I guess). On steamspy it seems to be the total accumulated hours of playtime devided by the number of distinct players in the total range of time (e.g. 2 weeks).
I was thinking of this devided by the 2 weeks (in days=24hours, which is devided by 14). This is the average number of hours players play E D per day. For me this is currently 0, in the last 2 weeks it would be something about 0.1h. Thats the number you are referring to in your OP:
If this average-time-per-player-per-day doubles the number of real concurrent players can be halved and nothing changes in the sum.
But what happens really on the figure "audience 2 weeks"?
This is my guess:
- Because of sales we have increase of total players.
- as the learning curve for the new ones is steep, its hard for them to stay in game => average playtime decreases
- After a while total players are decreasing again, but average time per player is increasing
=> Some of the new players are lost again, they don't like it
=> Those of the new players which found their way into E D now play extraordinary long because we all did this when we finally mastered the game
=> average is biased by a relatively small number of new players playing extremly long
=> only average is still increasing, median is decreasing (a good example why median is sometimes the better measure)
Future:
- everything will go back to normal after christmas. Holidays will contribute to higher average times again.
So, thats what I read from the numbers there. There is definitly nowhere something which lead to the conclusion that E D is dying. It is currently stable, all numbers imply this. For some people, especially finance people, that is reason enough to predict doom ;-)
You joined in late 2014, you obviously knew about the game before it was released on Steam, and now it would actually take you some effort to get the game on Steam rather than just keeping the FD version.
I'm sure there are some, but as that would take some degree of dedication and effort, which goes against the whole point of buying games through Steam (two clicks and you own the game, another click and Steam is downloading it for you and you know it's keeping it up to date automatically), I'm confident the people who buy through Steam, play via Steam.
This is a valid point, it's quite likely the playerbase who got in before Steam has more dedication towards the game. StuartGT's numbers in the link I posted above seemed to at least partially support that idea.
Interesting read and I largely agree. It does get a little bit hypothetical in the middle part though and maybe you are constructing casualties when there are none or are impossible to proof.
See the correlation between climate change and decrease in piracy
Interesting read and I largely agree. It does get a little bit hypothetical in the middle part though and maybe you are constructing casualties when there are none or are impossible to proof.
See the correlation between climate change and decrease in piracy
And how 100% of the people who ate tomatoes in the 1860's are now dead?
Interesting read and I largely agree. It does get a little bit hypothetical in the middle part though and maybe you are constructing casualties when there are none or are impossible to proof.
See the correlation between climate change and decrease in piracy
Hm, yes, I agree, bringing it to the point I always fail
Actually we all fail to define the case from the beginning on!
This we have in common with the typical biologist/physician who starts to argue with me and the analysis of his data after the analysis is finished and not before he starts his experiments...
We all know that according to some the game is dying since a few years and most of the time they'll show us some numbers from Steam Charts as proof.
http://steamcharts.com/app/359320
Problem with Steam Charts is that the data is not really reliable:
- PS4, Xbox and customers of the Frontier Store are completely ignored (which should be the most loyal players)
- Steam Charts only shows concurrent players which tells us how many Steam Users are in game simultaneously rather than the active player base
Why doesn't concurrent players tell us much? If anything it tells us how much time people spend in game and not how many people are playing it. If 24 people are playing the game for one hour a day and everyone starts at a different time, Steam Charts will tell us that only 1 person is playing the game. If they play for 24 rather than 1 hour Steam Charts will tell us that 24 people are playing the game which is an entirely different number.
If you still want to know if the game is healthy it probably makes more sense to visit Steam Spy because they tell us about the audience (unique player in 2 weeks). Allegedly there are 80,404 players who played the game at least once in the last two weeks via Steam. Problem with that number is that it isn't stored over time so when I tell you that it didn't change much over the last 3 years (it goes up and down between 65k and 100k) you'll just have to believe me or search my post history because I pulled that number repeatedly over the last few years. Another problem is that these numbers are just estimates and highly unreliable. There is no way to know the exact active player base unless you work at Frontier Developments.
http://steamspy.com/app/359320
https://i.imgur.com/SDodtvo.png
But some people always argue that you could still see a trend when looking at concurrent players and post that link anyway. Now the worst part is that they will tell you to look at a graph that is at the top of Steam Charts and allegedly shows the performance of the game by comparing peak numbers.
There are two problems:
- Peak concurrent players are actually worse than average concurrent players simply because that number changes drastically on specific events (First Thargoid encounter, Planetary Landings released, etc.)
- The numbers the graph uses are wrong
I don't think I need to explain further why using peak numbers is a bad idea to judge the health status of a game, but why does the graph use the wrong numbers?
1. Go to Steam Charts and set the graph to one year.
2. Hover your mouse over the line and notice how many data points are used.
3. Count how many data points are in the first 3/4 and how many are in the last quarter of the graph.
It's 9 data points in the first 3/4 and 15 data points in the last quarter of the year. This means that the curve is flattened in favour of early peak numbers which makes it look like there would be a drastic decline in concurrent peak players.
In reality they just pick the best results of the first three quarters and put them next to the mixed results of the last few months, which is of course wrong:
https://i.imgur.com/U4kOe98.png
So I took the numbers from Steam Charts and created my own graph using just 12 data points and added average concurrent players. It still looks like there would be a decline in players but that's most likely down to the first Thargoid sightings in early 2017 (if you look closely you can actually see that the numbers didn't change from Dec 16 to Nov 17...).
https://i.imgur.com/VSaUSfp.png
But how does the game perform since launch?
https://i.imgur.com/LAtkv9N.png
With average concurrent players:
https://i.imgur.com/ztYjRHc.png
(EDITjust noticed that there is something wrong with the months, give me some time to correct itlooks like it's just the label, data should be correct
As said above, nothing of that really means anything. It doesn't matter how many concurrent players the game has on Steam. Is the game dying? Probably not. Is it normal that a game doesn't attract as many players as it did 3 years ago? Probably. Do we have any data about Xbox, PS4, Frontier Store or even about the actual player base on Steam rather than concurrent players? Nope.
These charts are unreliable most acounts are bought through frontiers store of elite steam keys are secondary ad ons most of the Original buyers dont even bother adding the steamkey. making these charts irrelevant
+ the commanders with multiple acounts it be for different role plays .name for private groups extra acounts for exploration or colonia . those acounts are not linked to steam and do not register as such even if they are online with multiple pcs/mac xbox playstation and they are just as active as their main acounts.
I mean, you COULD jump to that conclusion, if you had already made your mind up about what you want to say and are just looking to nail a graph to it. It would be a bit daft though, given that it is extremely obvious that not everyone purchases via steam, so an entirely unknown proportion of players are not measured. And of course Steam users are in no way limited to only accessing via Steam. As t>, more steam users will launch without Steam, meaning that they are now showing as having stormed off in a huff as far as the stats are concerned.
Ultimately, anyone trying to make a point about the game's decline via steam statistics is fooling nobody except themselves.
So you assume that people who are not counted on steam are behaving fundamentally different than those counted on steam?
This maybe true, but I don't think so.
Its as likely that the climate is only changing at those locations where the temperature is measured => they neglect all other locations so it must be false to predict changes in climate.
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I have my own in game method of measuring the games popularity and that is by checking the number of player ships visiting in a particular subset of systems.
Generally speaking its remained fairly stable with a few periods when traffic doubled. This i recall was around the Thargoid reveals and also playstation launch.
A visit to the Pleides shows lots of people still playing the game.
Generally speaking its remained fairly stable with a few periods when traffic doubled. This i recall was around the Thargoid reveals and also playstation launch.
A visit to the Pleides shows lots of people still playing the game.
This number has a hard cut off because of instancing. So it is not a good measure for general increase or decrease of number of players. It would only be if the total number of players is very very small, lets say about 50 all in all ;-)
He talks about the system stats where you can check how many players visited the system in 24 hours.
CGs also have pretty constant participation numbers.
This, of course doesn't say anything about total numbers, but his point was - the numbers are stable and it's a good indication of overall population also being more or less unchanging
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oops sorry. I shouldn't read, write and watch the charity stream simultaneous.
And yes, that would be a good measure of general increase or decrease of player numbers. As long as no very prominent CG is going on elsewhere for example.
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