My understanding is you can’t have anymore than 30 people in an instance
The record is at least 100 in deep space and 75ish on a Horizons planet surface. So long as the first player into the instance has a top quality connection, you can get by with a few of the others having fairly bad ones (though the ones with bad connections or potato PCs will crash out if you try to do anything more exciting than sit around and chat)
Yeah that mostly makes sense, although it would require an awfully consistent churn rate to work out.
Strangely, I think they did - people were constantly complaining of no-one they knew ever playing any more during Horizons, but aggregate public measures of player activity (traffic, squadron, etc.) were stable or slightly positive throughout.
Thing is, they did just release an expansion which I assume they want to sell, so it’s not like keeping existing players happy (or winning back jaded players) is such a bad idea.
Yes - their quoted-to-market aim was to sell 1 million copies of Odyssey in the first year, which would very roughly have been all their regular and semi-regular players, plus another 500k new/occasional/returning players.
Wouldn't have been impossible, if the launch had gone well and they hadn't had to delay console release indefinitely, but I'd be very surprised if they get there now.
