It's time for a steamcharts thread!

[babelfisch]

I'm feeling a bit contrarian today, but I believe my logic is sound.

First, those are not great numbers, not for a game with supposedly 100+ employees working on it. And if ED is a 4 year old game, then Horizon Zero Dawn was a seven year old game the day it released. In other words, ED is not a finished game in the traditional sense. I'm beginning to wonder if the "play it while we build it" model was a good idea or not...

Second, the only numbers that determine if the game will be successful or doomed are sales - both game sales and cosmetic sales. While I suspect some of your steam numbers are new players (Merry Christmas!), most are probably people like myself who had shelved the game and picked it back up again when 3.3 dropped. However, I have not bought a cosmetic since Black Friday, and it is very unlikely I'll be spending any more money on the game, ever, unless some serious fixes are implemented (something Frontier is very bad at).

I'm not saying it's doomed, but I'm not opening a bottle of champagne either.

I believe there are many people spending quite a lot of money on the store. I don't, I only fly one ship and the paintjobs I want aren't available.

PS
I also disagree that the numbers aren't good. Elite is currently at #68 on Steamcharts, among some Steam only titles. That's pretty good for a niche game. Crusader Kings 2 is in that area as well.

 

[Old Duck]

I also disagree that the numbers aren't good. Elite is currently at #68 on Steamcharts, among some Steam only titles. That's pretty good for a niche game. Crusader Kings 2 is in that area as well.

A lot of niche games are written by a small Indie team with little overhead after release. FTL comes to mind, even NMS. ED supposedly has a large team to pay, along with server costs, etc. In other words, numbers being good or bad is a relative thing. And let's say all 10,000 (I'm rounding) players buy the next big update for, guessing $30 USD, that's $300,000 (ignoring taxes, cuts from Sony & Steam, etc). That's a lot for one individual, but for a department the size of ED's staff, it's peanuts.

Unless I'm missing something... I might be grumpy today, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

 

[Old Duck]

A lot of niche games are written by a small Indie team with little overhead after release. FTL comes to mind, even NMS. ED supposedly has a large team to pay, along with server costs, etc. In other words, numbers being good or bad is a relative thing. And let's say all 10,000 (I'm rounding) players buy the next big update for, guessing $30 USD, that's $300,000 (ignoring taxes, cuts from Sony & Steam, etc). That's a lot for one individual, but for a department the size of ED's staff, it's peanuts.

Unless I'm missing something... I might be grumpy today, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

ps - my last gig was with an Indie team, and we had "good numbers" as well, but the overhead still shut us down in the end...


(Ooops, meant to edit, not quote. Too late now!)

 

[Shinji Ikari]

I also disagree that the numbers aren't good. Elite is currently at #68 on Steamcharts, among some Steam only titles. That's pretty good for a niche game. Crusader Kings 2 is in that area as well.

I bet that's because of the long nature of the game, for example, you (probably) won't spend that much time playing Bioshock Infinite since it only has a history to be played which shouldn't take more than 10 hours to complete yet it's a very popular game. Same goes for many many indie games which simply aren't designed to be played more than 20 hrs.

 

[babelfisch]

A lot of niche games are written by a small Indie team with little overhead after release. FTL comes to mind, even NMS. ED supposedly has a large team to pay, along with server costs, etc. In other words, numbers being good or bad is a relative thing. And let's say all 10,000 (I'm rounding) players buy the next big update for, guessing $30 USD, that's $300,000 (ignoring taxes, cuts from Sony & Steam, etc). That's a lot for one individual, but for a department the size of ED's staff, it's peanuts.

Unless I'm missing something... I might be grumpy today, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

You are missing something.

The 10.000 players are concurrent, online players at one time. If the game had only 10.000 players they would need to play 24/7 to get to that number. The actual amount of active players is ~150.000-300.000. Steamspy used to tell us how many players were online in 2 weeks, with 6.000 average concurrent players they've been around 100.000. Add non steam, Xbox and PS4 to that and you get a pretty big active player base. And then there are also non active players who might return with the next expansion.

 

[babelfisch]

I bet that's because of the long nature of the game, for example, you (probably) won't spend that much time playing Bioshock Infinite since it only has a history to be played which shouldn't take more than 10 hours to complete yet it's a very popular game. Same goes for many many indie games which simply aren't designed to be played more than 20 hrs.

Absolutely. Other games in that area are Rome 2, Mount & Blade, Crusader Kings 2, The Elder Scrolls Online, etc. All games that people put many hundred hours into, similar to Elite.

 

[Old Duck]

You are missing something.

The 10.000 players are concurrent, online players at one time. If the game had only 10.000 players they would need to play 24/7 to get to that number. The actual amount of active players is ~150.000-300.000. S

This is a real number, not an assumption? If so, well then yes, I did indeed miss something! Did you emphasize that (bold) number in your OP? It's the more important number IMO. I'm too lazy to look back through the thread, LOL. Anyway, yeah, that changes the equation. Still not Fortnite numbers, but as long as it pays the bills at Frontier, that's what matters.

 

[StuartGT]

This is a real number, not an assumption? If so, well then yes, I did indeed miss something! Did you emphasize that (bold) number in your OP? It's the more important number IMO. I'm too lazy to look back through the thread, LOL. Anyway, yeah, that changes the equation. Still not Fortnite numbers, but as long as it pays the bills at Frontier, that's what matters.

SteamSpy's Fortnighly Players reliability as a stat was killed when Steam changed the GDPR privacy policy; the data could no longer be extracted from users' profiles anymore. For that reason it can no longer be trusted as being anything more than vague estimation now.

This was the latest archive of the page, from 7th March 2018, showing a daily peak concurrency of 10k and a fortnightly players stat of ~116k (± error margin):

 

[babelfisch]

This is a real number, not an assumption? If so, well then yes, I did indeed miss something! Did you emphasize that (bold) number in your OP? It's the more important number IMO. I'm too lazy to look back through the thread, LOL. Anyway, yeah, that changes the equation. Still not Fortnite numbers, but as long as it pays the bills at Frontier, that's what matters.

It's an educated guess based on previously available data from Steamspy. But you can easily calculate something similar yourself. Let's say each person plays 2 hours a day (which is probably way too much) you'd end up with 84.000 active players just on Steam (7000x24/2).

 

[WorldsGreatestForumDad]

This is a real number, not an assumption? If so, well then yes, I did indeed miss something! Did you emphasize that (bold) number in your OP? It's the more important number IMO. I'm too lazy to look back through the thread, LOL. Anyway, yeah, that changes the equation. Still not Fortnite numbers, but as long as it pays the bills at Frontier, that's what matters.

To be fair, and I say this sincerely. Those games are full of action and suspense.

This game is about to be flooded with screenshots from people jumping and scooping. This is what most of the community does here. Because there is no reason to really do anything else. Even with the thargoids. Do it a couple of times and you dont really see major results. This whole optional invasion so far to me has been kind of a mistake.

Its like someone breaks into my house and I say nah, this is supposed to be optional. I dont want to take part in this you have to leave. And then they do no questions asked.

We really think thats how that happens? I dont like comparing games to IRL. But this is a GD alien invasion in a video game. Invade us. Destroy personal and group assets. We would be fighting more if we had something to lose. Both PVE and PVP.

There is only so much of that you can take lol. So instead we have a crap ton of people about to play screenshot simulator. Im glad they enjoy it. But for the most part thats all there is at the moment.

If this game had some consistent meaningful action. Maybe we could reach fortnite numbers. Right?

We need consistency instead of bursty content for that to happen.

These charts will spike in the next week or so. Then back down because of the event.

On twitch during the salome event, Elite Finally reached top 20 in the games. The next week, it was back to the average of 46-200 viewers max at a time. Its not that people aren't interested in watching. But they need the consistent action and events for high numbers to stay steady. Like fortnite.

More people watching = more people playing. Dead serious.

 

[StuartGT]

To be fair, and I say this sincerely. Those games are full of action and suspense.

This game is about to be flooded with screenshots from people jumping and scooping. This is what most of the community does here. Because there is no reason to really do anything else. Even with the thargoids. Do it a couple of times and you dont really see major results. This whole optional invasion so far to me has been kind of a mistake.

Its like someone breaks into my house and I say nah, this is supposed to be optional. I dont want to take part in this you have to leave. And then they do no questions asked.

We really think thats how that happens? I dont like comparing games to IRL. But this is a GD alien invasion in a video game. Invade us. Destroy personal and group assets. We would be fighting more if we had something to lose. Both PVE and PVP.

There is only so much of that you can take lol. So instead we have a crap ton of people about to play screenshot simulator. Im glad they enjoy it. But for the most part thats all there is at the moment.

If this game had some consistent meaningful action. Maybe we could reach fortnite numbers. Right?

We need consistency instead of bursty content for that to happen.

These charts will spike in the next week or so. Then back down because of the event.

On twitch during the salome event, Elite Finally reached top 20 in the games. The next week, it was back to the average of 150-500 viewers max at a time. Its not that people aren't interested in watching. But they need the consistent action and events for high numbers to stay steady. Like fortnite.

More people watching = more people playing. Dead serious.

Fully agree - although I've corrected one bit

Here's the 12 month Twitch stats chart from SullyGnome:

While FDev tried a new thing in 2018 with two minor updates (3.1 & 3.2) in-between the 9-month gap of two major updates (3.0 & 3.3), they've certainly seen that those small interim-changes don't hold interest with CMDRs and viewers.

A six-month gap between large updates would be more beneficial, I feel.

 

[WorldsGreatestForumDad]

Fully agree - although I've corrected one bit

Here's the 12 month Twitch stats chart from SullyGnome:



While FDev tried a new thing in 2018 with two minor updates (3.1 & 3.2) in-between the 9-month gap of two major updates (3.0 & 3.3), they've certainly seen that those small interim-changes don't hold interest with CMDRs and viewers.

A six-month gap between large updates would be more beneficial, I feel.

Yeah buddy. And with that new giant team they have. I hope they keep those numbers and stay consistent and instead of doing a job and moving them elsewhere when they are done. Keep those people there. And pump out all sorts of different changes and content. Meta shifts, and PVE content.

Always keeping the game fresh. I think we need this the most. And hopefully this is the route they take.

But thats budgeting and stuff and I have no idea what plans are and all that. So who knows what they are capable of or want to do.

 

[[VR] M4st0d0n]

You got it.



It's really not that difficult to understand, but it probably doesn't help that English is not my first language. I am comparing the average concurrent players of the last 30 days to any other month since the game was released, and so far it looks like that number has never been higher. You are of course right that January is not over yet and it might be that everyone stops playing tomorrow. In that case the current average concurrent player record would probably drop below the 7046 from January 2018. I already told you that I know and understand that. However, I believe this will not happen, since the concurrent average player number increased over the last two weeks of January, so it isn't just based on good player numbers from December (which is still part of the last 30 days). It's likely that the numbers will slightly go down over the remaining January weeks, but probably not enough to go below 7046 for January 2019 in total.

Is that silly enough?

It's completely silly. You dont have the 30 days average from 14ish december 2017 to 13 january 2018... For all we know it could have been bigger. Do you want to get the average from a month with 5 saturdays as well...

 

[RexKraemer]

So we need the relation of current concurrent players to how many players played elite dangerous in total. As this relation depends on the average playing time of the player base we can not take this relation from other games. We need the real numbers of elite dangerous.
As steamspy can not provide these numbers anymore because of the change of the privacy settings in steam we can't get current numbers.

Using the wayback machine
https://web.archive.org/web/20160611021543/http://steamspy.com/app/359320
we get old numbers:

10 June 2016
Concurrent players per hour (HCCU), peak number: 4261
Audience in 2 weeks: 78278
Average playtime: 15:02
Median playtime: 3:40
I guess these are minutes, not hours.

So the factor to get player numbers from HCCU peak is: 18,37

The HCCU peak yesterday 12 Jan 2019 was: 11769
Therefor we have a total number of players through steam of: 216196

One year later
https://web.archive.org/web/20170629...:80/app/359320
the average play time didn't change much, so this seems to be stable.

Screenshots of the wayback machine:

Spoiler

 

[RexKraemer]

Deleted

 

[babelfisch]

It's completely silly. You dont have the 30 days average from 14ish december 2017 to 13 january 2018... For all we know it could have been bigger. Do you want to get the average from a month with 5 saturdays as well...

We have the average from the last 30 days, which is 7,914.9. January doesn't have 5 Saturdays. What is your point?

PS
Didn't see that you said 2017/2018... Sorry.

Yes, I know that we don't have that number. I already said several times that it might be that average concurrent players drop before the end of January. You somehow seem to ignore that. However, I believe it's very unlikely that it will drop so much that we'll go below 7000 for January. Apart from the topic being silly in general, there is nothing particulary silly about that assumption. Anyway, we'll see in 2 weeks if you are right or not.

 

[StuartGT]

It's completely silly. You dont have the 30 days average from 14ish december 2017 to 13 january 2018... For all we know it could have been bigger. Do you want to get the average from a month with 5 saturdays as well...

We don't have a SteamCharts 30 days Average archive from then, but we do have SteamDB showing the daily peaks during that period and the current equivalent period (upto yesterday - their live 7-day chart is accurate upto 5 minutes ago):

13 Dec 2017 to 12 Jan 2018:

13 Dec 2018 to 12 Jan 2019

I hope that helps show the considerable increase in Year-On-Year playerbase activity

 

[[VR] M4st0d0n]

We don't have a SteamCharts 30 days Average archive from then, but we do have SteamDB showing the daily peaks during that period and the current equivalent period (upto yesterday - their live 7-day chart is accurate upto 5 minutes ago):

13 Dec 2017 to 12 Jan 2018:



13 Dec 2018 to 12 Jan 2019



I hope that helps show the considerable increase in Year-On-Year playerbase activity

Well, looking at your graphs Jan 2019 looks exactly the same as Jan 2018 to me, and player peak for the last 30 days was in december (just like I said three pages ago).

Also, flash crash happened with distant worlds 2.

So far anything I said stand, I'm like the Nostradamus of videogamez.

 

[babelfisch]

So far anything I said stand, I'm like the Nostradamus of videogamez.

We'll see in 2 weeks.

 

[StuartGT]

Record numbers of players all jumping to witchspace concurrently, kills servers. Lots of records being broken during these 30 days

Higher and higher: