Trendspotting: POE Playerbase almost halved on Steam alone since the release of Awakening

"

Zhatan wrote:

So, not even a new temp league could make more then a minimal dent in the decline.

Something went very wrong here.

Looks like you aren't getting tired of this :D You'll probably quit in a year though like all the other doomsayers. Even the most dense ones realise after a while that the game isn't going anywhere.

"

Charanjaydemyr wrote:

Yeah, this totally needed to be brought up again.

Very, very, VERY few regular users of PoE use the steam client. People who use steam are constantly bouncing from game to game because that's what steam is all about. Using steam as an accurate indication of player retention when anyone serious about the game uses the stand-alone client is *stupid*.

Why is this so hard for people to understand?

You might as well try to argue that illegal drug usage is on the decline because there's a notable reduction in illegal drugs being used at parties. Because that's *absolutely* where 100% of illegal drug usage goes on...right?

A more accurate comparison would be if there was less E on the raves. Then yes, the E usage in the population would be going down.

Thats the whole point with a trend in the population, you can actually see whats going on without looking at every single individual. Why is that so hard to understand?

But hey, if you think we have lots of players when you can get into trade 1 from day 1 of a new league. Go ahead.

"

Zhatan wrote:

"

Charanjaydemyr wrote:

Yeah, this totally needed to be brought up again.

Very, very, VERY few regular users of PoE use the steam client. People who use steam are constantly bouncing from game to game because that's what steam is all about. Using steam as an accurate indication of player retention when anyone serious about the game uses the stand-alone client is *stupid*.

Why is this so hard for people to understand?

You might as well try to argue that illegal drug usage is on the decline because there's a notable reduction in illegal drugs being used at parties. Because that's *absolutely* where 100% of illegal drug usage goes on...right?

A more accurate comparison would be if there was less E on the raves. Then yes, the E usage in the population would be going down.

Thats the whole point with a trend in the population, you can actually see whats going on without looking at every single individual. Why is that so hard to understand?

But hey, if you think we have lots of players when you can get into trade 1 from day 1 of a new league. Go ahead.

You missed the point. He's saying (and he's 100% correct with this) that the Steam population behaves differently than the non-Steam one. So you have a trend within the Steam population, but that's it. You can't say anything about the whole population because you're missing the non-Steam part of it (which is bigger and behaves differently).

I will not assume poe community does this, steam community does that, as it is just wild assumption without any real data.

We have several different sources that we can look at. Steam chat numbers as best ones and biggest chunk of player base. We know when chris said that steam : poe client ration of players is around 50:50 back when the game was release. We can look at the popularity of twitch and most important actually joining trade chat in the game it self and see what channel you get moved to automatically (on expansion release you would join 30+ trade chat, few weeks after release you would join 10+ chat, and it went well with steam chat that showed a big loss of player base, so steam chat actually do show very well tendency of poe player base a s whole from the data we have).

I dont know in other leagues how its going, but the new hc 1 month league is very empty right now, with very little players playing it in peek times.

"

Charanjaydemyr wrote:

Indeed. Nowhere did I say that this filler league (sorry, did you NOT realise that's all it is?!) is popular or indicative of a player spike. Come on, people.

You know the next big thing is what GGG are working on right now as the game itself maintains a holding pattern, right?

Doesn't invalidate what I said about steamcharts being an inadequate at best, offensively ignorant at worst means of judging a game's population provided said game has a stand alone client that came years earlier. Nothing will, because I'm right. :)

First I was not directly replaying to you (if i did I would quote you like i do now). Second I didnt said that the filler leagues is a indicator of a player base. My comment for filler league was just that a comment for that the new league is very empty. And is somewhat maybe off topic for this.

The other parts of my post are the thing on topic and from where you actually can make assumptions and from what data you can make it.

And actually it invalids what you said. First you made assumption from thin air how players behave that have PoE client instal, compared to players that have pre installed on steam (and you even missed the third group that has steam, but players PoE on separate client) because you dont have any type of data to make any type of assumption (if you have please show). When it comes to steam and in game data, there is a lot more valid ways to make assumptions as there is at least some data to work with, and I posted how you can connect those two things. Are they 100% correct? No, but they give a nice look at the overall player base and how it reacts.

well, only GGG knows.

i would very much like to see some statistics from their side.

there was a time where ggg gave us a breakdown of starting/ending of a league or chris said they reached a new high in concurrent users playing the game (with an actual number).
Haven't seen this for quite some time now.

steam certainly shows a trend and there have been a strawpoll on reddit which showed that more than half of the reddit users are using steam.

i don't get it why ppl try to invalidate the steamcharts WITHOUT providing anything else other than "lel, steam, kek".
they are our only real numbers we have.
i'd love to have a "x amount of players are currently logged in" at the login screen (much like eve online) or have a graph on the homepage.

"

Ruefl2x wrote:

well, only GGG knows.

i would very much like to see some statistics from their side.

there was a time where ggg gave us a breakdown of starting/ending of a league or chris said they reached a new high in concurrent users playing the game (with an actual number).
Haven't seen this for quite some time now.

steam certainly shows a trend and there have been a strawpoll on reddit which showed that more than half of the reddit users are using steam.

i don't get it why ppl try to invalidate the steamcharts WITHOUT providing anything else other than "lel, steam, kek".
they are our only real numbers we have.
i'd love to have a "x amount of players are currently logged in" at the login screen (much like eve online) or have a graph on the homepage.

We don't need exact numbers, we can assume steam follows the same overall trend of PoE.

Big update = large flux of players

Then we have a slow decline until a stable population.

What we have to worry about is the bottom floor (the stable population) of players declining and not raising or staying the same. Not what max potential players we could have.

trendspotting, steam doesn't mean much, people constantly pick up the game because it is free and then give up after realizing it is complex

"

Manocean wrote:

trendspotting, steam doesn't mean much, people constantly pick up the game because it is free and then give up after realizing it is complex

This argument is so flawed. They dont do that more now then before.

And that steam users behave diffrently then other players is also a very big leap of assumptions. And above all, they dont behave diffent now then a year ago so it doesnt really matter.

While I agree that you can draw useful info from analyzing these statistics, PoE is a unique enough game that it will always retain a core userbase. These statistics are indicative of the casual playerbase fluctuating. Many people play continually and won't change. A stronger metric would be if you saw a large influx of long-time players posting quitting threads, like the League of Legends forums has had.