Numbers are absolutely plummeting

"

JoannaDark#6252 wrote:

I am going to assume that this is about POE2 , as usual. So, i'd like to point the way to the POE2 FORUM POSTS .... This is POE1 ffs.

This is the Early Access Discussion forum for PoE2. Maybe you're lost

Perfectly normal for games to lose players over time, and then regain some as content is released. I don't get why OP is being so dramatic about it. People play the game, they finish the main content, some stick around for endgame, some don't.

Nothing more to it.

I find POE2 far more engaging than POE1 but I am not a veteran of the first one in that sense but I played a fair bit.

Either way it is silly to compare a brand new game with one that has gotten content updates for over a decade. POE1 wasn't the behemoth that it is today from day one.

For me, it's how grindy Poe2 is. Citadels, grind until you find it. Then do it again 2 more times. Don't get me started on league-specific atlas points. 2+years to develop a game that just looks and plays just like PoE1 with a "ya change it up so our homework doesn't look the same" type feel to it. Game has the exact core-flaws as PoE1 does. Next to zero build diversity. half a dozen uniques are taking over the market. PoE2 is having the exact same issues PoE1 has. You either make yourself immortal (and have the prices of a few uniques sky rocket) Or you have so much damage you don't interact with any monsters. I cannot imagine how the ever intend to balance PoE2 when the difference between some builds is staggering. Again this leads to the same exact problems PoE1 has. Flavor of the month builds where 3/4 of the player base are playing a few skills using almost all the same items & uniques.

Build diversity is low because the skill trees and interactions between stats/uniques requires hundreds of hours to understand.

There are like eight people who decide all the builds for the season because they do build guides.

90% of people CANNOT make their own build that can spit out even a 1/10th of the top builds.

"

eternalJOURNEYofTHEloser#5873 wrote:

Today there was new low of just 72k players on steam. Why am I not surprised?

I just love how disingenuous these posts always are. POE 2 had 578k at peak. Currently has 132k 2 months in despite being a less than half finished, never balanced early access product. That's 22% retention, 2 months in. Aghast, Egads, how terrible!

How about POE 1?
Last peak, 229k July 22nd. 2 months later, September 22nd? 30k. 13% retention.

What about the GOTY contender Helldivers 2, on its actual release?
458k Feb 19th, 166k April 19th, 36% retention. Not bad. By May 19th though they were at 78k, 17% retention. Took them a bit longer to get there.

Another GOTY contender, Black Myth Wukong?
2.4 million players Aug 22nd, 145k players by October 22nd. 6% retention.

I could go on, easily. It's almost like player loss over time is expected behavior and virtually any game over enough time which isn't specifically Counterstrike 2 will look like an EKG if you look at Steam charts; sharp peaks when expansions, major patches, or other events happen, then a decline as folks move on to other things. Rinse and repeat.

But, what about the legendary stable player base of POE 1? It was just built better! Everyone has decided to go back to the superior game! Or so I hear. Except, its low last night was under 5k players. So, clearly not "everyone". And of those 5k players, how many do you think were bots? Are even 1k players actually playing the game at the low tide mark?

What about Last Epoch? Low of under 1k active players last night. Diablo 4? Low of under 10k last night, peak of 20k. Torchlight Infinite? Lows under 2k, highs scraping 4. Lost Ark? Low of under 15k, peak of 27k.

I mean, it's so weird. Looking at the numbers you would think that more people are playing Path of Exile 2 than literally the entire rest of the ARPG genre put together, and it is one of the most popular games on Steam or something. Oh wait, it is. Currently one of the top 10 games being played right now. And that's despite being an admittedly less than half complete early access game with absolutely no balancing done yet and bugs rendering it nearly unplayable or actually unplayable for a lot of people. But yeah, dead game, and all that.

You keep spending your nights furiously "refreshing" in front of the Steam Charts pages, looking for new lows in player count. You'll find them. But the narratives you're attempting to spin as being implied by those drops in players are blatantly false and require a shocking level of intellectual dishonesty in order to peddle them.

That's still a ton of players, and it's normal for a game to lose players over time without any major updates. There's nothing wrong with that.

I can 100% guarantee the community and the dev's that the reason so many are leaving is do to the absolute difficulty of the game. When game progress suddenly halts and the players spend days to weeks trying to continue progress in the game and can't. They give up and leave the game. Something I personally am planning on doing myself. It is not a joke when I say that Path of Exile is far more difficult than any souls game or any other game you think of. Especially for the casual player. They leave to play something they can relax and game on instead of going through constant emotional distress and stress in general.

yeah talking about PoE1 is a backwards idea and making events out of it too is insane, the future is PoE2 no wonder people are leaving

"

Lixy#2668 wrote:

I've been saying this since December. The tourists aren't going to come back season after season. Each successive wipe of POE2 will bring back fewer players than before. And if they continue to alienate their POE1 fanbase, POE2 could start seeing season peaks below 300k which would be an absolute disaster.

That's when we will actually get movement on POE1 vs POE2. I don't think they will give up on POE2, but they will realize that they just can't support the two games in parallel.

So eventually we they will discontinue POE1 altogether, and at that point they will be forced to start making POE2 more like POE1. This is all obvious and predictable, and yet somehow people don't see it coming. Including the GGG devs.

If this is what happened and i also think it will be and have been saying it for almost since they announced the split of 1 and 2 then all their earned good will they have would be irreconcilably lost for me, i would never go back no matter how much like poe 1 they make it, screw them and screw that they made their bed.

"

GiantOctopodes#2562 wrote:

Spoiler

"

eternalJOURNEYofTHEloser#5873 wrote:

Today there was new low of just 72k players on steam. Why am I not surprised?

I just love how disingenuous these posts always are. POE 2 had 578k at peak. Currently has 132k 2 months in despite being a less than half finished, never balanced early access product. That's 22% retention, 2 months in. Aghast, Egads, how terrible!

How about POE 1?
Last peak, 229k July 22nd. 2 months later, September 22nd? 30k. 13% retention.

What about the GOTY contender Helldivers 2, on its actual release?
458k Feb 19th, 166k April 19th, 36% retention. Not bad. By May 19th though they were at 78k, 17% retention. Took them a bit longer to get there.

Another GOTY contender, Black Myth Wukong?
2.4 million players Aug 22nd, 145k players by October 22nd. 6% retention.

I could go on, easily. It's almost like player loss over time is expected behavior and virtually any game over enough time which isn't specifically Counterstrike 2 will look like an EKG if you look at Steam charts; sharp peaks when expansions, major patches, or other events happen, then a decline as folks move on to other things. Rinse and repeat.

But, what about the legendary stable player base of POE 1? It was just built better! Everyone has decided to go back to the superior game! Or so I hear. Except, its low last night was under 5k players. So, clearly not "everyone". And of those 5k players, how many do you think were bots? Are even 1k players actually playing the game at the low tide mark?

What about Last Epoch? Low of under 1k active players last night. Diablo 4? Low of under 10k last night, peak of 20k. Torchlight Infinite? Lows under 2k, highs scraping 4. Lost Ark? Low of under 15k, peak of 27k.

I mean, it's so weird. Looking at the numbers you would think that more people are playing Path of Exile 2 than literally the entire rest of the ARPG genre put together, and it is one of the most popular games on Steam or something. Oh wait, it is. Currently one of the top 10 games being played right now. And that's despite being an admittedly less than half complete early access game with absolutely no balancing done yet and bugs rendering it nearly unplayable or actually unplayable for a lot of people. But yeah, dead game, and all that.

You keep spending your nights furiously "refreshing" in front of the Steam Charts pages, looking for new lows in player count. You'll find them. But the narratives you're attempting to spin as being implied by those drops in players are blatantly false and require a shocking level of intellectual dishonesty in order to peddle them.

comparing apples to oranges here ...

one is tiny bit of extra content on 10 year old game with slight tweak to mechanics

the other is brand new game with unsolved meta ...

no PoE2 bleeding players THIS fast is NOT a good sign for live service pseudo mmo title

if it had set release schedule that would bring "leagues" in lets say old 3 month intervals then yeah having current 25% player retention after 2 months would be quite goo, thing is its been 2 months since the start of the beta, there were ZERO content releases since, the patches they release so far are a BAD joke, there is zero information about when the next content is supposed to come out ...

on top of that they broke the promises of supporting PoE1 and even admited they knew for SIX MONTHS now that there isnt any work being done for the functional viable product they have just to put the few devs needed for leagues development to work on the bug ridden mess that is the ALPHA version of PoE2 ...


you call people watching charts doomers, while those people are just pointing at teh proof that the game is NOT a viable product yet and that the requirement for it to become viable is so impossible that the game will be going the way of the other similar failed projects like the New World / Lost Ark / "insert whatever mmo-lite of recent release you like" ...