GGG should probably address the player retention rate

I talked 3 friends into giving PoE a chance, they all quit due to low drop rates.

This is also why I stopped playing eventually.

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anubite wrote:

I've played a lot of small games. Like, real small. As in, <100 active players at any given moment, small. Here's some estimates from my own personal experience:

5 avg active concurrent players | 25 total active players
80 avg active concurrent players | 625 total active players
600 avg active concurrent players | 5,000 total active players
40,000 avg active concurrent players | 400,000 total active players

The last statistic is from EVE Online.

Currently, PoE's average concurrent players, is what... well /players doesn't work anymore, but if it did, I'd guess between 50k and 60k concurrent players. This suggests a player base larger than EVE's. Let's say there are 500,000 totla active players for PoE right now.

If only 5% of these players spend $10 during the Holidays, GGG has made $250,000 USD.
If only 2.5% GGG has only made $125,000 USD.
If only 0.5% GGG has only made $25,000 USD.

The first two possibilities suggest sustainable growth - remember that NZ is not the US, $125,00 USD should go a decent way over there. Of course, the actual numbers should vary a lot, since the average amount a player buys is over $10 for sure.

Given PoE's player counts I would not worry about retention rates, as long as players come and go, some amount of them will spend between $10 and $50, unless they're like Charan.

It's probably around 24k conccurrent right now. When Chris posted concurrent numbers after realease, you could see that around 50% of them were on Steam, and 50% weren't. Last time I checked, few days ago, Steam was showing around 12-13k concurrent users, so I would say we're talking about 24-26k total.

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Odoakar wrote:

"

anubite wrote:

I've played a lot of small games. Like, real small. As in, <100 active players at any given moment, small. Here's some estimates from my own personal experience:

5 avg active concurrent players | 25 total active players
80 avg active concurrent players | 625 total active players
600 avg active concurrent players | 5,000 total active players
40,000 avg active concurrent players | 400,000 total active players

The last statistic is from EVE Online.

Currently, PoE's average concurrent players, is what... well /players doesn't work anymore, but if it did, I'd guess between 50k and 60k concurrent players. This suggests a player base larger than EVE's. Let's say there are 500,000 totla active players for PoE right now.

If only 5% of these players spend $10 during the Holidays, GGG has made $250,000 USD.
If only 2.5% GGG has only made $125,000 USD.
If only 0.5% GGG has only made $25,000 USD.

The first two possibilities suggest sustainable growth - remember that NZ is not the US, $125,00 USD should go a decent way over there. Of course, the actual numbers should vary a lot, since the average amount a player buys is over $10 for sure.

Given PoE's player counts I would not worry about retention rates, as long as players come and go, some amount of them will spend between $10 and $50, unless they're like Charan.

It's probably around 24k conccurrent right now. When Chris posted concurrent numbers after realease, you could see that around 50% of them were on Steam, and 50% weren't. Last time I checked, few days ago, Steam was showing around 12-13k concurrent users, so I would say we're talking about 24-26k total.

I would expect the retention rate for steam users to be significantly lower than that of those who use the standalone client. This would be out of some sort of self-selection bias.

Probably. But I don't think the difference is substantially large.

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UnderOmerta wrote:

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CharanJaydemyr wrote:

But good? Oh yes. For a free to play game, it's pretty damn good.

This line needs to die. There've been plenty of free to play games over the last few years that have been as good as ANY pay to play title out there. You can no longer judge free to play games on a curve.

+1 free-to-play is a business model not some charity deserving a praise and lowering the expectations. it is business. remove 'free-to-play' from the picture please.

as for the 'niche' stuff. you can make offline niche games for friends. it is much harder to make a niche game with co-located servers and 24h support. poe is business. poe needs to a) sustain its costs b) produce revenue that are higher than opportunity cost

while you can pay NZ programmers less than in US because costs of living are lower you cannot do the same trick with co-located servers around the world. these machines cost a lot. no matter if people play or not (ofc you can scale it up/adjust but waste of processing power happens anyway). game to exist as a business entity has to 'create' money. niche game with <10k supporters (That mostly already spent all they ever wanted to spend) is on the verge of business continuity.

fixed costs (55 employees! this is one heck of a payroll each month!) do not go nicely along with 'niche game for few hardcore d2 veterans'. dont try to play your way around that - this simply is not possible without masses of not-so-veteran nor not-so-elitists 'casuals'. i bet that primary source of cash for ggg is 'stash tab bundle' bought by casuals that shortly after that quit.



ive read here some astonishing thesis about how hard this game is and how casual other games are. are you blind? there is nothing 'hard' about this game! there are bits of complex mechanic, mostly complex because these are obscure and vague and lack of combat text makes for some amazing mind-games of 'guess if it works'. is this hard? really?

there is more SKILL needed to play bf4 than to play poe. if people lvl98 die because they were playing while snoozing does not convince you.. try to play battlefield while tired. impossible. simply impossible. with poe? 'read monster affixes', 'avoid reflect', 'logout when surrounded', 'pick uniques and rares, vendor'. this is what people do during 99% of their playtime. theorycrafting a build and trade (social-engineering at its best) takes less than the remaining 1%. poe (nor d2, nor d3) is NOT a 'hard' game. keep telling it to yourself if it makes you feel better but poe is not a 'hard' game. it is a game that requires mountains of time due to grindy nature and feels like 'work' but it is not 'hard'. all that rants about 'todays' gamers is just to make somebody feel better about himself. but these dont hold water at all

want a hard game? civ4bts challenges on civfanatics await. and civ4 civilopedia is COMPLETE so no annoying guessing games.


btw - source on 'steam players quit faster' than normal ones? and how many of steam players are old players that converted (for convenience)?

PoE has more users online than COD Ghosts: Multiplayer

That is an achievement.

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sidtherat wrote:

btw - source on 'steam players quit faster' than normal ones? and how many of steam players are old players that converted (for convenience)?

No source on that for you, but my comment was an objection in response to

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Odoakar wrote:

It's probably around 24k conccurrent right now. When Chris posted concurrent numbers after realease, you could see that around 50% of them were on Steam, and 50% weren't. Last time I checked, few days ago, Steam was showing around 12-13k concurrent users, so I would say we're talking about 24-26k total.

.

All I was saying is that there's no reason to expect the distribution to remain at 50/50. It's possible that it has, but not obvious. (For all we know, it has shifted towards more steam users, though I would think it unlikely.)

Basically what sidtherat said above.

"we are making a game that we want to play" simply doesn’t work any-more when you got 50+ people on payroll and servers that need to run 24/7 across the globe.

(Another) fallacy is that this game will survive long-term just on a minor core of "fat purse" supporters and that "casuals" with $50 (and lots of friends with $50) can GTFO that way ----------->

PoE has actually the luck that currently the competition in the ARPG field is very bad.

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anubite wrote:

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deteego wrote:

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SL4Y3R wrote:

RMT is a problem in all online arpgs. Don't think I can say much else there.

This is a logical fallacy. Every online game has RMT is there is an online economy. Games like PoE have much larger issues with RMT compared to other games that aren't so grind without reward centric

How can we know RMT is really a problem with PoE? All evidence we have of it being a big issue is anecdotal.

If it is an issue, GGG would know, they'd have data to suggest it, but without their insight, any accusation of RMT being a problem is likely to be overblown by the fucking fact everyone likes to complain about how they aren't getting Kaom's to drop every night. Or they just can't understand how so-and-so got so rich (hint, he probably played the game more than you).

I've also noticed that a lot of people who complain about RMT being a problem suggest GGG should just make it "legal" via the cash shop. lol, it sounds to me like a lot of these lazy complainers are just guilty of being RMTers and don't want to be banned doing it; anybody with a serious investment in this game would never even suggest such a thing.

If you watched the recent interview with athena, Chris essentially stated that RMT is a cat and mouse game and its a significant problem, mainly due to the game being F2P and hence an easy ability to create a lot of free accounts

Also this is somewhat besides the point, because what Sla3er said was logically fallacious, regardless of whether or not RMT is a significant problem.

Claiming that RMT isn't a real problem for PoE because every online game with an economy has RMT is like claiming that theft isn't a real problem in Brazil because every country has theft as an issue

(for those that missed the anology, Brazil is one of the countries with the highest amount of theft in the world, other countries have theft, but its much smaller than Brazile, so its not a real problem)

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Jojas wrote:

If you pay a lot for something that you value, you will have a hard time being harsh in your critizism about it. Because the more you critizise it, the more you devalue it. And the more you devalue it, the more your spending a lot of money on it reveals itself to have been a bad decision.
And as far as my experience goes one of the hardest things you can do, is admitting that you have made a bad decision. Unless it hits you in the face, of course.

I've made this argument before as well. That when you pay for something, you want to like it, to justify your purchase. And logically, the more you pay, the more violently you'll defend your decision.

But neither your scenario nor mine can be considered the standard, because what you're describing is ultimately a service, whereas I'm talking about an actual product. Yes, cheapskates are often cheapskates BECAUSE they complain about everything, thus in terms of service, can often glean discounts and reductions, playing on the maxim of the customer always being right.

If you look at actual products, though, people who pay more for them WILL be much quicker to complain if something goes wrong. While there is anecdotal evidence both ways, I think the more primal concept of 'I want my money's worth' overrides 'I'm a cheap bastard and I'm going to complain because I can'.

In the case of PoE, I've noticed that higher supporters tend to express their lack of satisfaction more civilly than those who haven't supported at all. This could be because supporters feel as though they've a 'relationship' with GGG, that there's some contract between them that demands a modicum of politesse. 'I paid for this when I didn't have to, so obviously I like/love it and support it...but...' is the tone I typically see from higher supporters when they do voice a grievance.

And I genuinely think that when a higher supporter 'flips' like that (and we've all done by now, at least once, to some degree), it has a stronger impact than when someone who hasn't supported at all airs the same laundry as has been said for months. It indicates that something has gone really 'wrong' to cause such dissatisfaction as to give a higher supporting player cause to regret that support.

If you doubt this, then I'll be blunt: if I say to Chris, 'I'm quitting and here's why', you can *guarantee* it'd have more impact than if someone who hasn't paid at all said the same thing. I'm not really happy about that favouritism or bias, but it'd be a simple case of basic economics. "What the hell have we done wrong when someone who's thrown *that* much money at us over time wants to leave?"

(Or maybe it'd be 'fuck, rich people are so hard to please. So fickle...')

Even here, in Ethical Land: money talks, bullshit walks. Of course everyone's entitled to an opinion and anyone has the potential to say something that might change the game forever...but in the end, it's a business, and it's entirely in GGG's best interest to keep the higher supporters happy, just as it is to maintain diplomatic mutual relations with high volume streamers.

But this 'keeping the whales happy' ethos should operate within reasonable limits: we're higher supporters because we trust GGG to do things their way...

...within reason.

__

I agree that PoE's success was largely a case of others' failures. GGG are going to have to find their niche before the next slew of ARPGs hits the scene. I think they have very sound concepts, unique and VERY potent: leagues are a brilliant idea, the item crafting concept is sound even if the execution is sadistic, and the Skilldrasil/Skill gem system can keep us going for years.

I'm just not sure they're equipped or willing to make the compromises necessary to bring such concepts to full fruition.