Five Weeks into 0.2.0, POE2 is Down 93.2% Players All Time & 83.9% from Patch Launch

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rob_korn#1745 wrote:

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evermilioon#4881 wrote:

Just be honest with yourself poe as a whole never had the best player retention,and the best it ever was (player retention wise) is in poe2.

It only holds for 0.1, and anything less than that would have been a dead on arrival.
Of course people will spend longer checking everything, anywhere on the spectrum between those that actually like the game, to stubborn ppl not liking it but keeping on going for the sake of the test/goodwill.

On the other hand, now that the honeymoon effect is fading off, the story is very different. 0.2 has amongst the worst retentions ever.

Upvoted. A 90% drop in the playerbase within just one month (and that’s likely a generous estimate, considering bots) says everything about the game's actual health. And no, it’s not because everyone completed all the content.

What really bothers me is how stubborn and deluded some people are—blindly defending GGG’s bad decisions like it's a religion. The game literally has less content now than in major patch before. Sekhemas, Trials, Delirium, Breaches—all of it dead.

Around 80% of classes are currently unplayable and overnerfed. People aren’t playing Amazon just because it’s a new class — Kitava is also new and It barely hit 8% pick rate, less than Deadeye. That should tell you something.

Releasing a new patch with drop rate “fixes” that just revert everything back to the 0.1 state. I have no idea what the QA team is doing but they’re not testing at all, or GGG is just too small indie company to afford proper QA.

I could offer to join their team myself if things are really that bad on the testing front.

Also funny how GGG doing same mistakes like they never created POE where they had exact same problems and already fixed them.

For me, the campaign is the most horrible part by miles.

After making 3 characters last league, starting a cursed necro this league, and rerolling... I just couldn't care, not at all.

The campaign is horrific. There is no other word to describe it but horrific.

And most disappointingly, GGG believes if they shove more "stuff to do" we will just suddenly like the campaign... who on earth told them that? Whoever did lied hard to GGG, because nothing short of making the campaign shorter is fun.

Short campaign = prerequisite to fun. No short campaign = no fun.

It's just a horrible, un-fun, horrible, sad, un-fun and horrible time playing the campaign. It's truly horrific.

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ShaDarkLord#6528 wrote:

A 90% drop in the playerbase within just one month (and that’s likely a generous estimate, considering bots) says everything about the game's actual health. And no, it’s not because everyone completed all the content.

There's no need to estimate, we have some data available.
While the bot issue is bound to be more severe as PoE2 attracted a bigger audience, we have no data so can't really use that. But that's not even needed tbh.


Steam numbers, including China market

Dawn of the hunt :
Peak : ------- 246 345
Day 35 : ----- 50 476
Retention : --- 20.5%

Steam numbers, not including China market

Settlers of kalguur
Peak : ------ 229 337
Day 35 : ---- 62 497
Retention : -- 27.3%

Past leagues day 35 retentions for reference :
Necropolis : 20%
Affliction : 42.3%
Ancestor : 33.2%
Crucible : 25.3%
Sanctum : 37.3%
Kalandra : 21.5%

Sources :
https://poedb.tw/us/League#ConcurrentPlayers
https://poe2db.tw/us/League#ConcurrentPlayers

Theyve got work to do on PoE2, for sure, but focusing at all on PoE1 is creative and (eventually) financial suicide.

The smartest thing they could do is rip the band-aid and sundown PoE1 tomorrow. Apologize that they thought they could do both, queue up previous leagues that rotate quarterly, press shuffle, and turn off the lights.

Any amount of time given to a 10 year old game, at the expense of the 6 month old one, is more detrimental than actually throwing money away.

The stats are laughable. Poe2 had an unpopular early access patch in an already crowded month for gamers. 6 months ago the PAID PoE2 launch doubled FREE PoEs all time players. Nobody talks about that, and they shouldnt, because trying to glean anything from early access stats is an insane reach.

Is this how the PoE community acts when there is one bad patch? Its no wonder that one dude retired young. Yikes.

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matma#0311 wrote:

Theyve got work to do on PoE2, for sure, but focusing at all on PoE1 is creative and (eventually) financial suicide.

The smartest thing they could do is rip the band-aid and sundown PoE1 tomorrow. Apologize that they thought they could do both, queue up previous leagues that rotate quarterly, press shuffle, and turn off the lights.

Any amount of time given to a 10 year old game, at the expense of the 6 month old one, is more detrimental than actually throwing money away.

The stats are laughable. Poe2 had an unpopular early access patch in an already crowded month for gamers. 6 months ago the PAID PoE2 launch doubled FREE PoEs all time players. Nobody talks about that, and they shouldnt, because trying to glean anything from early access stats is an insane reach.

Is this how the PoE community acts when there is one bad patch? Its no wonder that one dude retired young. Yikes.

Stats are what they are, stats, only that.
The irony of you talking about insane reaching, together with "financial suicide", "sundown PoE1 tomorrow", or someone retiring.
I'll agree with you on "Yikes" though, that's exactly how I felt reading your post ^^

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evermilioon#4881 wrote:

At least it took 3 weeks for that.
People stop playing a new poe1 league in the 1st week, as soon as they get to the repetitive 2 screen clear gameplay.
Just be honest with yourself poe as a whole never had the best player retention,and the best it ever was (player retention wise) is in poe2.

Actual stats available on SteamCharts prove this to be inaccurate, wildly inaccurate.

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matma#0311 wrote:

The smartest thing they could do is rip the band-aid and sundown PoE1 tomorrow. Apologize that they thought they could do both

The smartest thing they could do is rip the band-aid and sundown PoE1 tomorrow. Apologize that they thought they could do both

That band-aid has already been ripped off. GGG's decision during 0.1 to publicly announce the reallocation of resources to PoE2 and the delay it would create in the PoE1 pipeline said everything anyone should need to hear. They've been interacting with the PoE1 player community for over a decade, so they definitely knew the impact this announcement was going to have and likely anticipated the backlash they received. Knowing that, there's really only one explanation for their decision; the massive success of the PoE2 EA launch gave them (and Tencent) the confidence that the potential future revenue from PoE2 would more than compensate for what they stood to lose by alienating a certain subset of the PoE1 player community.

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Is this how the PoE community acts when there is one bad patch? Its no wonder that one dude retired young. Yikes.

The reality is, the patch wasn't even that bad for an 0.2 EA build. Its rough spots were amplified by a ton of negativity on social media, but a lot of that was driven by the anger and disappointment of the aforementioned PoE1 diehards. There's a long list of major improvements in 0.2 that have basically gone completely unacknowledged in all the noise.

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Kraythax#2592 wrote:

Actual stats available on SteamCharts prove this to be inaccurate, wildly inaccurate.

If you Google options for improving PoE2 performance one of the first suggestions is to switch to the Standalone client. There were dozens of YouTube & TikTok videos suggesting the same early in 0.2. Tens of thousands of people have stopped using the Steam client.

Not that any of these numbers matter anyway, mind you. Every single person who opened the EA once represents a potential player at 1.0. GGG knows this. Tencent knows this. They don't care if those people want to play during EA as long as they can bring them back for 1.0 (which they absolutely will for a huge number of these players).

Every EA patch is going to follow this same pattern and I have no doubt you guys are going to be here going on about these numbers every time and the answer is always going to be the same.

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matma#0311 wrote:

Theyve got work to do on PoE2, for sure, but focusing at all on PoE1 is creative and (eventually) financial suicide.

The smartest thing they could do is rip the band-aid and sundown PoE1 tomorrow. Apologize that they thought they could do both, queue up previous leagues that rotate quarterly, press shuffle, and turn off the lights.

Any amount of time given to a 10 year old game, at the expense of the 6 month old one, is more detrimental than actually throwing money away.

The stats are laughable. Poe2 had an unpopular early access patch in an already crowded month for gamers. 6 months ago the PAID PoE2 launch doubled FREE PoEs all time players. Nobody talks about that, and they shouldnt, because trying to glean anything from early access stats is an insane reach.

Is this how the PoE community acts when there is one bad patch? Its no wonder that one dude retired young. Yikes.

That would be a fatal nail in the coffin. A year of players saying GGG is going to go back on their word and are just stringing us along and you ultimately say "Yep, deal with it b***es!" That would prove without a shadow of a doubt that GGG is now a TenCent bought, owned, controlled and operated shill and they would loose half their player base right there. Now if they are a TenCent shill they absolutely should do this. They should make the campaign really hard, 10x harder than it is now. Then they can sell boost MTX packs and boost MTX currency to the 1% whales and the transition to a typical TenCent product will be complete. They will have ruined a name once venerated in the ARPG community and the makers of Last Epoch and Diablo will fall out of their seats laughing. Both were very worried about the threat of POE2 but now they no longer need to worry. Other game makers will eventually fill the gap and POE as well as GGG will be remembered for what they did, cashed in to goodwill of a loyal fanbase to make a Pay to win MTX ridden money machine that caters to whales.

The funniest part is that there would still be people here defending their actions.

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Kraythax#2592 wrote:

Decisions like:

1. Let's create a new kind of game that mixes Souls Like combat with 90,000,251 enemies coming at the player at once.

Yow this is literally act 1 freythorn.

80% of my friends left after hitting freythorn. The others left after hitting act 3 drowned city.

I remember by brother tantruming in our group chat when doing sekhemas trial in act 2.

I understand the game is not for everyone. But making a game for only 5 to 10 people is also not ideal.

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Kraythax#2592 wrote:

That would be a fatal nail in the coffin.

Guy, it happened already. It's done. The process has very clearly started on sunsetting PoE1. All of the writing is on the wall in bright neon so the fact that you can't see it tells me you just don't want to.

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A year of players saying GGG is going to go back on their word and are just stringing us along

A year of some players saying that. This is what it comes down to guy -- you think these opinions are shared by most players, but the reality is the overwhelming majority of players don't share their opinions on forums or social media. You're looking at content from a small slice of the player community and assuming it represents the whole and it just doesn't.

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That would prove without a shadow of a doubt that GGG is now a TenCent bought, owned, controlled and operated

...guy, what are you saying? GGG was absolutely bought and is now owned and controlled by Tencent. That happened years ago and has been very public knowledge ever since. I'm so confused.