Population Numbers
" It was a 100-hour game before 0.2.1. Now it's a 300 hour game. Most people have played it out. The endgame, and other systems, need to be fleshed out before it justifies hundreds of hours. (Of course, people do play hundreds of hours. And then are bored.) Nothing to worry about yet. |
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I am not on board with this interpretation of "just normal for games like this." The declining rates are a bit steep.
Maybe they can turn this around until release with more "chase items" and some changes to the atlas. I hope they can. | |
" On the other hand POE2-KILLER aka "Last epoch": 2,916 with just 2 months into season - hahaaaha Last edited by Azimuthus#1135 on Jun 19, 2025, 5:53:32 AM
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I'm coming back once there are balance changes for under-performing classes. At this point, tank the over performing ones too. How much worse are the numbers going to get? Not like anyone who played meta before has anything to be upset about. They're likely not playing now anyway.
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Yep I had to stop playing due to DC...this is a serious issues and should be a top priority to GGG.
Tech guy
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The number of players decreased due to a bad patch and server crashes. Many friends stopped playing for these reasons, because a similar story happened at the beginning of League 0.2. It's not even about the seasonality of the leagues, but about ggg's ignoring and silence towards the players. Poe 2 is certainly an interesting and beautiful game, but this attitude towards it is frightening. If there was information that work on this was in full swing, and the players would have already realized that they would not have lost, they would have realized that they were not forgotten.
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" Even if the steam numbers are only a percentage, by looking at the graph, without even looking at the numbers or comparing to other games, you can see the decline. If you are comparing to other games then this game is 1 cough away from a pneumonia death. I've been keeping track of the steam numbers, about 60% of the current league players left within a month, of those another 40% left. You can't invalidate steam numbers if you are speaking with percentages, since it is a contained comparison. |
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" Compare it to any other hack-slash ARPG. You will be shocked )) |
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For a bunch of people who play a statistical roll-based game almost every person here is terrible at interpreting insights from numbers.
You can't just take steam play-count numbers in a vacuum, and the narrative that "something is wrong with the game" because of a declining player count does not take into account any other factors - especially the fact that poe1 just had a brand new league come out and many people would be playing that right now instead of poe2. The game is in EA. It's a beta. We are all beta-testing. The key we purchased (or received due to poe1 spend) was to voluntarily get access to a beta, to be a beta-tester. A beta-tester for an un-finished game. The fact that people treat it like the purchase of a fully-fleshed out finished game and then think it sucks - because it has a lot of issues that stem from the fact that it's an un-finished game, is quite frankly stupid. I'm not saying there is no place for valid criticism, but the overall attitude from many players is that of "if I have any struggle in this game, it's trash" alongside any legitimate or constructive criticisms. Maybe some people didn't realize what they were getting into. Maybe they were misled, or maybe they're stupid, or maybe they just figured $30-40 wasn't too much to support GGG and wanted to try it out and will come back when it's released, or maybe they won't. Who knows. Either way, holding up declining steam player count numbers to support any claim other than "Less people are playing now" doesn't fly. It doesn't say that the game is good, or bad, or anything. It says that less people are playing now, than there was then. That's it. It doesn't indicate a pneumonia death, and it doesn't speak to the quality of anything. How do we know that it's not 7k diehard aRPG whales all buying points and supporter packs every league vs 150k casual players who spent $30, disappeared after month, and will never be seen again? This game is going to be free to play. Probably 90%+ of the people who download it to try it out will die to the Miller and never touch the game again. Does that make it a bad game? Or does it make it a game for a specific kind of player? I think it makes it a game that caters towards a niche part of the gamer market. Trying to please the highest number of people possible is a mistake. You want to make the game for people who actually like your game, not the ones who will never like it until it's a cookie-clicker loot-casino, which we already have in poe1. I'm also willing to bet that many many people who have early access are waiting for new characters, weapons, skills, and acts to drop, and feel that they've seen everything the game has to offer right now. Using steam player-count numbers to try and talk about the game's quality is a non sequitur. |
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" If you compare the rate of decline between POE1 and POE2, you will find that the player retention in POE1 is about twice as high. Just treat it as half life, if you want numerical proof. The central question is: Will that faster decline be solved in a full release version? We dont know, but it is certainly worth discussing it. Right? |
