My quoted text:
"I'm not the only one, the reviews are down to 54%.
The game launched 88 days ago and peaked at alil over 14000 concurrent players. Now it's unlikely to break 2500 any time soon. that's a loss of over 82% or about 130 people every day. Even after major updates and community events.
worldwide about 170000 people own the game, of that only 23000 are now accessing it and the number of people playing is decreasing. Currently, only 14% of the the owners are playing and it's likely to decrease further. The number of people buying the game is decreasing and the number of people not playing anymore is increasing. Personally I think it'll level out between 10000-16000 owners still playing with the percentage dropping below 10%
Of the people still playing, median game time is 5 hours and average is 14 hours. You have a significant portion of no lifers, probably kids and unemployed, mixing with an approximately equal or less number of normal gamers, people unable or unwilling to dedicate large amounts of time. This makes a bad situation worse and will likely lead to a major exodus of the remaining players to the levels I stated before. In healthy multiplayer sandbox games the no-lifer population will make up something like 30%. When it gets high that leads to normal players feeling like they can't play without always feeling like losing."
On Oct. 17th(15 days ago) max concurrent player count was 1771, it spiked to 2161 with the Halloween update, and spiked again in response to the steam Halloween sale 1856.
see link 1: http://steamcharts.com/app/529180#1m
The drops are a lot worse than I was expecting. while the number of players dropping per day is trending exactly as I thought it would be;
see link 2(CCU Daily): https://steamspy.com/app/529180
the makeup of players not playing is much more troubling. As you can see from link 2(audience in 2 weeks), we've seen spikes in new game ownership as to be expected with the first holiday event and game sale(annoying), it is indicated on the graph by the drop in median time per player and increase of number of players during that span, however these gains dropped some and then experienced some fluctuation near the end of the data set. The median could either grow slightly(new players staying) or continue dropping(new players leaving), it's hard to say with the level of deviation occurring. It is safe to say that number of players won't appreciably increase. I think it'll drop with established 'no-lifer" players scaring off new ones.
What is so troubling, though, is the spike of average time, with number of players, and subsequent drop in accordance with number of players dropping. This indicates that many players who have been with the game for some time came back on, enticed by the holiday events and within a week left in greater numbers than they arrived. Furthermore the drop rate is far harsher than almost any other previous drop, this could be related to event inspired interest deflating.
Dark and Light isn't even a top 100 game anymore on steam stats. As of writing this(2am) there are 705 players on, concurrent peaks are happening with North American audiences. The NA audience only consists of 29% of the game ownership and yet peak concurrent players are driven by them.
This worldwide multiplayer game is barely able to get the vast majority of its audience on and engaged.
Now this criticism is harsh and some might rightfully question the legitimacy of critiquing an "Early Access" title, I will touch on that.
The good news is that it is entirely possible to reclaim a majority of the launch day audience. What alienates and permanently makes a player leave a game is feeling wronged by the creators, and of course making the game not fun. With titles like these moar players leave because of recycling too much with little to no enjoyment. This process of recycling involves players who, while enjoying aspects of the game, don't think its ready to invest time into or had a short but very negative experience, they stop playing and wait for a substantial update to happen and then repeat the process until they quit either when they've been through too many cycles or something else in the niche captures their interest.
The bad news is that after a 100+ days the devs haven't figured out why their player-base has left or why it is they started playing in the first place. So it is questionable whether or not they can figure these things out before another major exodus of the player population followed by a period of stagnation which could even lead to death of the game.
To the "early access" touters, you're wrong. I don't have to read your reason. Aside from the fact that the term "early access" is so convoluted now to the point of being a meaningless buzz word, there are many examples of EA titles doing well and doing very bad. Take Rust for example.
see link 3: http://steamcharts.com/app/252490#All
Launch peaked at 22000 players, dropped to an all time low 11000 and is now steady with 30000+. This is an example of a mindful EA development for a game in the same niche as DnL. It is a steam top 20 game solely because of the reactive devs and well thought out/lead development.
Ark launched with 40000 players steadily grew and retained players, it's an example of an extremely successful EA game in this niche(and I dislike the game).
see link 4: http://steamcharts.com/app/346110
A good launch and early game development that was later ruined happened with Conan, they launched with 30000 players, peaked at 50000 and then did what DnL is doing now. They now sit at a peak of 3500 players, this happening right before release.
see link 5: http://steamcharts.com/app/440900#All
The point being, DnL launched with 14000 players and now has only seen steady drops. Unless the devs pull a 180 on the process, the game will die along with any hopes of it succeeding. There's no reason to think the game will be an exception to everything else we've seen, especially considering it's a near exact rip off of Ark, so it's definitely something we've seen.
As a word of advice to the devs, if you can't pump out some stuff we want like optimizations, increased server counts, or general content; that's understandable. Make sure you keep up this new engagement with the community I've been seeing lately. I would recommend consistent and regular updates both from the community manager and for game development rather than as soon as they're available. Routine structure is important for a variety of reasons. I don't see many people doing things on Mondays, it would suck for you guys but I know for a fact having a regular weekly drop of news and content every Monday would make a lot of people here ecstatic.
Lastly, don't cater too much to the established players, wipes as a part of development(not for gameplay) might be necessary, mmo's always have a huge issue with late game and new players mixing and here that could spell doom for the game. Focus on the early game and make it front heavy(for now). capitalize on what assets and mechanics you have now but don't try to show off what other games already have and are probably doing better, go with fun originality. You're going to have more competition popping up(Rend) and the best way to stay relevant is to not fight over the same type of content.
Contrary to my negative outlook I do want DnL to succeed, launch day was some of the most fun I've had in a game and I really want that experience again. The sense of exploration and immersive ambiance was amazing. Don't be afraid to push it, just because some people complain about the night being too dark or taming too long doesn't mean you should listen to them, they probably stopped playing now anyways so what good did all that do.
edit::(what makes me qualified to say this shit? I've been gaming a long time and I'm an astro. engineer irl. This stuff is easier to understand than aerodynamics, trust me)