The ending of POE ?

"

Monster_T wrote:

38k playing 10min ago - yeah, just 10times higher as you have said - its completely dead, yes.
C'mon...

"

Biovital wrote:

Don't even bother replying to this guy. He's the leader of the white knights, there could literally be 1 person playing and he would say the game is in a fantastic spot.

"

shoju wrote:

"

Monster_T wrote:

38k playing 10min ago - yeah, just 10times higher as you have said - its completely dead, yes.
C'mon...

Synthesis debuted on a friday to 111,114 on Steam
Last Friday, at the same time, 42,115 On Steam.

Peak the next day, Day 2 of League 98,904
Peak Last Saturday, 46,373

Completely dead? No.
In a seriously bad spot right now? The numbers point to: Definitely.

No matter how you slice it, 3 weeks into the league, Synthesis has lost >50% of it's steam playerbase. It took Betrayal twice as long to shed 50% of it's player base on Steam. In the business of statistics, and retention (something I analyze as a professional) that is a deeply troubling trend, and points to problems with the product.

Even adjusting for the massive hype bubble that Betrayal had due to the timing of Betrayal and the Community's "rage" over D:Mobile, You simply cannot account for the heightened decay that Synthesis is going through with the publicly available data.

I have to believe that GGG has a better grasp on the numbers, and that they have employees who are in the business of parsing these numbers, but considering that when they tout concurrency numbers, they are only ~50% more than what you see in Steam ratings, it's safe to say that the variance between the actual loss of players, and the steam loss of players are pretty close.

Based on the Steam numbers, you have to imagine that the current state of things has GGG and Tencent going through plenty of unpleasant conversations focusing on how to course correct. You don't build the momentum that you had with Betrayal, and then trip so hard on the follow up without repercussions. Even if this doesn't cost people jobs, it should at the very least get them thinking about how to fix this, in the very near future.

I wouldn't be surprised if 3.7 brings some sort of flashback / legacy / mashup league that doesn't take much balance / resource work, while they reformulate a plan on how to fix this.

I could be wrong. I wouldn't be surprised if I'm wrong. But at some point, the numbers don't lie, and they will have to reorganize, and take stock of the player revolt that they've witnessed so soon as such a massive wave of success.

"

shoju wrote:

Lets be clear, I never said this was the death of PoE.

But lets also be clear. This massive of of a failure on the heels of the most successful league in the history of the game IS a problem.

TLDR:
Death? No.
Serious Problem? Absolutely.

Talk to other people who do marketing and analytics. We aren't just talking about a league with a short shelf life. We're talking about a poorly received league on the heels of the height of the game's popularity.

This is the type of thing that will have lasting effects on the game's ability to draw in new-ish players, who stopped playing after the failures of Synthesis. They have created a former customer base that they can't win back, and in the age of the internet, those people all have a voice that can reach people. The fallout from Synthesis will have a significant dampening effect on the progress they had made with betrayal.

If that dampening effect isn't addressed. If the problems that exist now aren't fixed, if they don't move forward in 3.7 with a vision on winning back the fringes of the playerbase now that have a bad taste in their mouth based on the league? Well, this may not be the death, but this could be the slow decline that leads to the death.

There are those who will ride or die PoE. That's not the people that GGG needs to concern itself with right now. It's the people who have been turned off by Synthesis, and the Standard Atlas debacle.

As the Steam charts show, GGG rides that opening wave of the league, and those waves were getting big. I could be wrong, and PoE could weather Synthesis, and the 3.7 wave could buck the trends, and be an improvement over Synthesis numbers. But, that's going to take some serious self reflection by GGG, and a forward focused path to win back players.

Otherwise? I would wager that the 3.7 League Launch spike on Steam will probably fall short of 6 digit concurrent players. Probably somewhere in the 15-18% drop off range. My assumptions would put it somewhere between 93k on the high side, 88K on the low end.

That estimation is based on past Steam data for the game, as well as some of the analytical values that I use in my day job.

There is a model that I use at work that could put the 3.7 spike down as low as 75k concurrent, depending on releases of other games, alone.

No, I don't work in Video Game market analysis, I work in e-Commerce Data, and build statistical models regarding fluctuations in the market that I work in. Not the same, but the curves of the Steam Charts are comparable to the peaks that I see in my market, just at different intervals.

So, yes, there is some assumption, and a margin of error. But the point still stands, that without a course correction between now and the launch of 3.7, there are going to be less than "amazing" numbers in the future of PoE's concurrent player spikes at the beginning of leagues, which will lead to a small retained playerbase as the league ages.

"

shoju wrote:

You obviously don't work in marketing.