Can Path of Exile compete with Lost Ark and Elden Ring?

A new league is not going to compete with a new major game release in the same genre. Assuming 3.17 is Feb 4th that will give them 4 days before everyone's attention shifts to Lost Ark. All the PoE streamers already stepped away from this game during Scourge to play a LA beta, that's just what is going to make sense for them to do because brand new releases pull in a lot more viewers trying to figure out how a new game is compared to season 30 of a decade old game. It's also Amazon, AKA twitch, and they are certainly going to have streaming deals to demand the attention of content creators and lots of twitch drops to get people watching similar to New World.

I don't know what if any impact this will have on GGG, concurrency numbers will probably be noticeably lower, but this may not prevent their supporters from still buying packs and just playing less or playing both games. It might be another Blight, but Blight didn't kill GGG so I don't really think anyone has much to worry about.

I will probably pop in to PoE around mid-league, unless it sounds like a boring league.

I don't think Elden Ring is a factor. It's late in the month and I don't think there is a lot of playerbase overlap.

Does it have to? Willing to bet most players of either game haven't touched PoE OR they ran from it having figured out its game.

I see little to PoE that would appeal to Souls players or Korean MMO fans, even if said MMO looks like an ARPG. Old Exile friend and guildie is deep into LA; caught up recently and he made clear that it's less an ARPG and more an isometric MMO. Might be splitting hairs but given my own experience with Korean MMOs, they might look like a different genre (Vindictus and BDO both look like gritty action games) but it doesn't take long for that Korean MMO dna to reveal itself in every layer of monetised crafting, storage and more crafting.

Im not saying you can't play all three but I am definitely saying there is no serious competition between them. Frankly only an Exile would think otherwise and Exiles don't always have a clear view of the forest.

This isn't exactly a WoW exodus to FFXIV situation and unless GGG are *way* more interesting than any of us know, it never will be.

Lastly, I know it was a long time ago now but if you think real hard you might remember what happened last time people assumed a big release might hurt PoE. It was close but thank God GGG had the foresight not to compete with a flawlessly released game with a bona fide A-list actor leading the way. Phew, definitely dodged that bullet.

PoE has its addicts and they won't be swayed by the other games, Lost Ark? A small game that's been knocking around for years and has had no impact on the grand scheme of things, it'll be easily ignored by the 'hardcore' PoE addict.

Elden Ring will be one of the biggest games of 2022 and could attract some of PoE's audience, mainly the casual players, but really both games won't attract PoE's 'hardcore' audience but the rest of us who addicted to PoE will likely play and enjoy Elden Ring and some of us may forget about PoE until PoE2.

I don't get why people always need to compare PoE to games like LA which is a MMO and Elden Ring which is said to be an ARPG, but you'll play it once for a week and then it's over. People who have been playing games like diablo and PoE or even last epoch will still play those games, especially if the new PoE leagues are appealing. In my opinion, yes, PoE can compete with these games for at least 2-6 weeks every 3 months. When PoE 2 comes out you'll be asking yourself the same question (if LA can really compete with PoE 2 or whatever)

lost ark is not really poe competitor, poe is seasonal ladder reset arpg, like d2, d3, median xl etc, lost ark is basicaly WoW, with daily quests, weekly raids etc, in lost ark if you play 1 character there is like 1h of content a day, remember its a free to play mmorpg not arpg

lost ark is shit, and has nothing in common with arpgs, so not really

elden ring is going to tank 3.17 player numbers though

"

Foreverhappychan wrote:

Lastly, I know it was a long time ago now but if you think real hard you might remember what happened last time people assumed a big release might hurt PoE. It was close but thank God GGG had the foresight not to compete with a flawlessly released game with a bona fide A-list actor leading the way. Phew, definitely dodged that bullet.

This is kind of the point though. Cyberpunk set all sorts of records at release and had over a million concurrent players on Steam for a while, even though it was a totally different type of game GGG knew it would have tanked the player numbers at league start and they mentioned the first two weeks of a league being the most important. It was probably a very good decision, despite the broken console releases and the meme levels of hipster hate, the game did phenomenally well and had a ton of people absorbed into it for weeks.

Lost Ark doesn't have as much hype, but still quite a bit, and it's genre relevant even though people are going to try to tell you otherwise "because daily quests." It is a direct competitor and is probably going to have as much or more of an impact on league start than Cyberpunk would have. But they pushed league start directly into the path of it.

I don't even like LA, but it's not P2W...POE isn't the same thing anymore and to be honest it's pretty repetitive and boring, and we don't see any motivation from GGG to change that. The only concern is how to improve the skin look to sell more boxes, and the game takes a back seat. So YES, the chances of a massive dropout are great.

"

lolozori wrote:

LA being the biggest P2win mmo-arg around, I am surprise that the poe fanatics who enjoyed POE for being "honest" and not P2win would suddenly fell for it.

So maybe Poe audience is not what it seem to be and they actually enjoy p2win and cheating models?

You can tell when people just discovered from software games because they seem to think they compete with POE somehow. POE survived all the previous ones and it will survive this one as well.

I don't even know how many MMOs POE has seen come and go during its lifespan.

It's so blatantly obvious that these 2 games aren't specifically big threats to POE, and are really just recent "competitors" which means they are, for this particular moment, the go-to games for people who are mad at GGG right now to launder their mad through.

If you want to quit POE and tell GGG that, you can just do it. You don't have to name some other game to do it.

Good gravy, the amount of white knighting PoE is ridiculous. People dismissing Lost Ark as a small game, dismissing From Software games. People ignoring the problems with PoE.

Whether you like it or not, PoE will be competing with both those games, and to a lesser extent, MH: Rise. All are games in the RPG genre and all have crossover fans. Are there people who will only play PoE? Of course there are. But are they the same people that contribute the most to PoE's bottom line? I'm not so sure about that.

It's also worth noting that Lost Ark has been in development and been play tested for a long time. What is released to NA/EU will be polished.

No matter how you slice it or dice it, 3.17 is a very important league, as the previous two have tanked, so 3.17 has to right the ship.