New Games Suck... Or Is It Just Me?

If it was a Steam exclusive, maybe. But it's not. Even then, as I have said, our resident conspiracy theorist is blocking out all context. This was a busy weekend for online gaming. Player count for an offline game tells no story at all. Especially when its only counting players on a singular platform. If people aren't playing the game on Steam, they aren't being counted. It's a useless metric for sales.

What do you mean exactly? Resident evil 7 has low steam peak player count of 20,449, but it sold 4m 2 months after release.

Are you going to suggest most of those 4m players who bought the game without deep discount only bought the game but don't play them? This purchase behavior doesn't make sense to me.


(Edit: in case if anyone wonder if RE7 players quit early which may leads to low peak player count, RE7 also has 40% game completion trophy, so most people aren't quitting early in game either.)

The fact is that steam peak player count is a terrible metric in every way. It doesn't even accurately track how many people has played the game, just concurrent players on one platform. And we all know concurrent players isn't the same as people who played the game at least once.

This is kinda what I was thinking also.

It's one thing if people aren't buying the game because all the reviews are horrible and another if sales are high because all the reviews are stellar, but in this case it's reviews are so mixed and reception is very different among a lot of reviewers. It seems to me player counts are a better metric than sales alone at this phase because it shows how well the game is resonating with people who bought it early and how they are or aren't engaging with it. If people are buying the game and only putting in a few hours then that's a good indication that the game is selling due to marketing but it isn't connecting with the player base.

I know it's not the most accurate metric, but I'm not sure sales are either in the first week of a games release when the reviews and info on the game are so contentious. How much people are playing the game seems like a better metric for how good it is and how people are receiving it.


This absolutely happens and it can often be tracked by # of players who achieve certain achievements. I remember a big release, I forget which one it was, where something like 5-10% of the playerbase never finished the very first achievement, one that you had to do to get off noob island (or whatever the equivalent was for that title). I think a lot of people, myself included, are asking if it's worth the time to play it more than they are concerned about the purchase cost.

The return window also shuts off after 2 hours, there have been plenty of games I've bought over the years that I put 4-5 hours into then decided it wasn't worth my time and moved on, most recently DD2.

I already added additional info in the last post. On steam RE7 has 40% completion rate on Normal and 46% on easy. Also 96.2% of players completed the easiest achievement.

Safe to say "people quitting early" really did not happen to RE7.

If RE7 has high refund rate then it won't break 4m sales in 2 months either.

How else can you explain RE7's low peak player count but high sales, besides peak player count as a metric sucks?

Every metric we actually have access to sucks in one way or another. If you want to use a metric to support any argument, there will absolutely be one you can use.

But, if a game is widely accepted as good, it's going to have high player counts. You're using an example from over 6almost 8 years ago, when validity of steam's data is going to correlate to steam adoption rates. Steam's been growing over time, and the release of the steam deck was huge. Citing completion rate after 67+ years is also strange, since it gives a much longer time for people to play through backlog and decide to finish games they weren't initially impressed with.

Ultimately, nobody can force you to accept a metric as relevant. Number of sales is a great way to tell how much money the company made, but there are plenty of heaping piles of trash that still made good profit. You have to draw your own conclusions on which metrics are relevant and why.

Not sure what Ive made up, but go on.

Youre the one endlessly repeating about “Veilguard shattering Bioware records on steam” when:
1-those records are in regards to player count, something youve also said means nothing
2-Bioware hasnt had a game on steam in well over a decade, when physical media was still the norm

Some numbers as of this morning from twitch, testing Thorny's hypothesis that any metric can be useful. Anything stand out as unusual with the followers here? Viewers obviously too volatile to be useful.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard
32.9K Viewers
7.2K Followers

Black Myth: Wukong
1.6K Viewers
78.8K Followers

Resident Evil 7: Biohazard
412 Viewers
1.6M Followers

Monster Hunter Wilds
24.2K Viewers
13.2K Followers

FINAL FANTASY XIV ONLINE
3.3K Viewers
1.9M Followers

FINAL FANTASY XI ONLINE
88 Viewers
159K Followers

FINAL FANTASY XVI
343 Viewers
67.5K Followers

Baldur's Gate 3
1.8K Viewers
275K Followers

Diablo IV
8.8K Viewers
773K Followers

ELDEN RING
3.6K Viewers
1.8M Followers

Stellar Blade
26 Viewers
16.9K Followers

Not sure what your gameplan was here, because generally when people tag something they're interested in, they dont untag it once its past its due date.

In terms of concurrent player v.s sales ratio, time does not matter in this case. Since it's 2017 peak player count v.s 2017 sales, not 2017 concurrent data v.s 2024 sales.

I think it's probably true that completion rate may increase slightly over the years. But I don't believe people are mass quitting RE7 way back in 2017 either. It's not a bad game with mixed reviews.

If you want to use concurrent as a data to estimate sales, you need average gameplay time data as well. Since longer games will have higher concurrent player count and vice versa.

Here is one post that explained the methology on how to use concurrent player data. It also included other methods for comparison.

https://gamalytic.com/blog/how-to-accurately-estimate-steam-sales

They did managed to make concurrent data more accurate than using review counts. EXCEPT they also used average gameplay time data with it. And average playtime data isn't available in public unless you write an API to grab such data from public steam profile or something.

And even then it's sales estimate on one platform, not all.

So, unless you did the work to get playtime data and run the test with a more serious model like the post in the link, it's hard to take those sales prediction seriously.

Oh this is *** great, I just discovered theres a twitch tracker

Heres Elden Ring, which released Feb 2022, and DLC released June 2024

As you can see, there are a lot of viewers upon release in Feb 2022 and then it dies down, and then it picked up again in June 2024, and then it slowly died down again.

Its almost as if people get bored of watching people a game as it gets older, and move on to something else.

What were you expecting to find when you dug up those numbers Kaffy?

No plan, just curious so I looked a few popular games up. Can't be sure the people following played or bought the game, but you can kind of get a feel on how they were received based on followers. Thanks for filling in the release dates, that helps. I tried to remember more games released this year but then added some others like 11 and 14 just for kicks.

https://twitchstats.net/ seems to have more data, but I don't know if it's accurate or current.

Now were blaming this on the election? Are you dumb like Viciouss??

This whole thing was started by someone from Brazil over the Suicide Squad game, released early 2024.

So how can you explain a HUGE increase of "woke game" on Google trend that happened exactly on mid August? Why didn't it happened on any other time?

I only reference data and draw a possible conclusion. If this spike happened on other time then I would draw a different conclusion. But I will only change the conclusion when I see a different data.


Google trend did not show a increase of "woke game" keyword (nor any other political keywords) in early 2024. It only spiked in July/August.

There are also many other keywords spiked in July-Sept and only in this timeframe, such as "Trump" or "DEI". It's perfectly fair to draw the conclusion that election caused this.

To be clear, the point I was trying to make was that any metric can be coopted as support for an argument, not that any metric can be legitimately useful or meaningful.

Sorry, I'm bad at explaining my thoughts and didn't mean to attribute something to you that you didn't say. I think I wanted to compare using steam current players to twitch viewers/followers, but without asserting any claim based on the data I posted. Was going to let people draw their own conclusion, if any.

I think Kaffy's numbers are current, and not daily average, so lets look at the twitch tracker and compare D+2 average viewers, shall we. D+2 means 2 days after release date. I'm going with two because thats what twitch tracker has for Veilguard, were currently on D+3 and the dataset is incomplete. I took out the MMO's and MH Wilds

Dragon Age: The Veilguard - October 31, 2024
24.1k

Black Myth: Wukong - August 20, 2024
158k

Resident Evil 7: Biohazard - Initial January 24, 2017
53.9k

FINAL FANTASY XVI - June 22, 2023
67k

Baldur's Gate 3 - August 3, 2023
144.7k
What happened with this game in Oct 2020? Why were there 61k views about this game?

Diablo IV - June 5, 2023
377k

ELDEN RING - February 25, 2022, Erdtree - June 20, 2024
492.5k, 219.7k

Stellar Blade - April 26, 2024
36k

Soooo if twitch viewers is a reflection of anything, on D+2, Veilguard is dead last of your list.

I would say metrics with large amount of data from the past is still meaningful. Such as the methology that I posted in the above link. Statistics is science not feelings, that's for sure.

What isn't meaningful is reading the player concurrent data as it is then instantly made a statement that the game "flopped".

Even when we use Steam reviews to estimate we wouldn't just say 7k review = 7k players. That's kind of silly. There are different review:sales ratio for different genre and under different condition. If you have large amount of data for different review:sales ratio your estimate can be relatively more accurate.

Suicide Squad was released February 2024. It takes time for people to dig ***up. This thread was started September 2024, Drayco clearly started it to interfere in the election!

Sure was spot on for Dustborn, Concord, Suicide Squad, Unknown 9, yadda yadda ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yeah I was just entering each game on twitch search and copy pasting the viewers/followers that came up.

Veilguard was low on followers despite having a high viewer count (lots of popular streamers playing it).

More like different political factions decided to put more money on internet campaign in August, lol. A game that released in February but people waited until the August to talk about it? Doesn't make sense.

In my region we have intense election too. And words can't describe how much money "election industry" made from doing internet campaigns during those time. If you think people running campaigns would never put more money on internet campaign 4 months before election you don't understand how "election industry" works. Because it is absolutely how it worked in the past.

As for Drayco's post, it can be a pure coincidence. Doesn't mean political factions didn't put resources in this field. Those are 2 different things.

Those didn't have 80k+ concurrent players either, lol. You are literally looking at DAV's 70-80k concurrent player and said it'll fail like universal fact despite it's 4 times more than RE7/SH2 and about the same as Metaphor ReFantazio. Which seems like an estimate based on feels.

And honestly I've never heard of any of those games you mentioned above until anti wokes spams it on various forums. So is it a surprise that they didn't become a hit?

If we use RE7/SH2/Metaphor ReFantazio peak player count as a reference, I think DAV can hit 1m sales eventually.

August you say?
You mean Kotaku and IGN writing hit pieces about Wukong and Game Science for their game releasing in...August

Idk about IGN, but I am pretty sure Kotaku is very political to begin with. Kotaku is one site that I often avoid because they are biased as ***.

RE7 came out in 2017
SH2 is a remaster

Not sure where ReFantazio factors in because one of these things is not like the other:
Dragon Age
Resident Evil
Silent Hill
Metaphor ReFantazio

The first three are big established IP, the last one is not. Also it looks like a game that had a AA budget. Not that that is a bad thing, just these things matter.

This does not matter. And I explained why in the last post. It's 2017 concurrent player:2017 sales within 2 months timeframe, not 2017 concurrent v.s 2024 sales.

My point is that concurrent players on steam can be much, much lower than sales. Both RE7 and SH2 proved it with only 20k concurrent players, but they both broke millions copies sold easily.


It's a discussion of concurrent player v.s sales ratio, so being a remake does not matter either.

Does being a remake somehow lowers concurrent player count? Or do you think more people buys SH2 but never play it because it is a remake? I see no evidence on such assumption.


How does ANY of these things changes concurrent player : sales ratio?

The only possible factor that can change such ratio is either game length, average playtime, if people quit early, or if people buy those games but don't play. I don't see how IP/remake matters much unless there are large amount of people who only buy games at launch for nostalgia reasons but don't play.

If concurrent players were a true measure of everyone playing, then this would be a true statement. But, you're leaving out the growth steam has had from 2017 to 2024, including the vast amount of usage driven by steam deck's affordability.

Review count is utterly meaningless. It correlates to game sales, but it also correlates to ad spending (because shocker, a LOT of reviews are just ads), which itself correlates to game sales.

Nynja isn't saying the game didn't sell as far as I can tell, he's saying people aren't playing it in large numbers. And, that appears to be true.

This is why I keep saying to wait for the shareholder reports, because theres no way factually state what the sales are. I wouldnt even consider whats written by the journos to be factual, because they'd very easily lie to the general public. The shareholder reports are where the real numbers come out.

Going back to Outlaws: if we were to believe the journos, Outlaws was a huge success and AC: Shadows is gonna be a huge success too. And then the shareholder reports came out, and it turns out Outlaws such a flop and AC:Shadows is trending in that direction that they had to get a third party investigator to find out whats going on there.

Why do I need to repeat this the third time?


Why does steam growth from 2017 to 2024 matters if the sales data used in the discussion are 2017 March data?

We are NOT discussing RE7 sales from 2017 to 2024, which is 13m. We are discussing data from 2017 Jan to 2017 March, which was only 4m.

Steam growth from 2017 to 2024 does not matter because I never referenced sales number past 2017 March.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_Evil_7:_Biohazard


If were to believe everything stated on the wiki page is accurate, of the 2.5 million units sold between Jan to March 2017, 200k of them were on steam, 8%.



Well as I've just pointed out, it very clearly does. PC media was still sold in a physical format in 2017. It may have been on its way out, but it still existed.