I was curious just how the game really is doing. The Steam Charts page suggests the game gained roughly 6300 players over January and February of this year.
This came after a few months of relative stagnation in the numbers.
Explanations for this varied, but I believe the general consensus was this was a boost coming from the Chinese servers being shut down (and maybe the Australian ones as well).
Assuming that conjecture is correct, this year’s player base numbers are actually rather startling.
If this is what happened, I presume it’s fairly safe to say 100% of the people playing on those shut-down servers did not make the migration to the remaining ones. So, that 6300 players was NOT all of the players. In that initial shut-down of servers, many players were likely lost. Consider that from Targem/Gaijin’s points of view.
Since then, the numbers have been in a free fall with a slight uptick in April and a leveling out for the 1st 2 weeks of September. Anyone remember what happened in April?
Since the badge update, we all know what’s been happening with the reviews.
This is now what people see on the Steam store page for the game.
It was suggested elsewhere that these negative reviews were “bots.”
So, I checked into that.
You can filter reviews by number of hours played by the reviewer.
If I set the filter for roughly the last month & limit reviews to people who have played over 100 hours (meaning you’re getting people who are actually playing the game), this is what you get.
VERY NEGATIVE
However, if I change the parameters to include people who have only played 0-20 hours (meaning people very new to the game and potential bots), this is what you get.
But what about those bots?
If I set it to only show reviews for people who have played 0 to 1 hour, where I would assume we’d see the avalanche of bot or “review bombing” reviews, this is what we see.
Only 15 reviews. 10 of them have written out reviews, so they’re not some mindless effort. I would assume these are people from PSX and Xbox who created a Steam account to leave a review. These, I suppose, one could call “review bombers.” 15.
My conclusion?
The numbers look brutal. Assuming that 6300 player bump early this year was only a portion of the players from the Chinese servers, then the total player base was most certainly much higher than the 12115 number we saw on the Steam Charts. The original player base prior to that shut down may have been double that. Since then, the number has dropped to 8620. It’s not gaining. Even with very active devs apparently working hard on this game, it’s not attracting or keeping new players.
There wasn’t any wave of bots posting reviews.
The longer people play, the less they like the game.
That “mostly negative” in the recent reviews is not going to encourage people to join.
We have a saying here.
When surrounded by vultures, try not to die.
Are the devs the vultures?
I think there are two possibilities.
First, the less likely.
The Developers realize the game needs to be friendlier to new and casual players and make changes to facilitate this. The game slowly starts to re-gain players, and the players that never left start playing more often. I would be in that latter category.
The more likely one.
The devs saw the huge drop in players when they lost China.
Prior to that, the Western servers were stagnant for a very long time.
Since then, they’ve been losing players.
They came to the conclusion that their time for earning income from this game was limited.
They decided to do everything they could to make as much money for as long as possible.
This is why everything NEW to the game is behind a paywall.
Battle Passes, Mini-Battle Passes, Packs and Crosscrowns.
This is why they attempted to force everyone into clan-like play, because clan player spend money.
This game, I think, will survive as long as the whales keep it alive.
It will continue to get worse and worse for everyone along the way.
If you rank the game a 7 out of 10 today, it’ll be a 6 tomorrow, a 5 the next day, a 4 after that.
