TL;DR:
- concurrent players =/= daily account logins
- the base is huge & probably loose with money
- an ad campaign services game sales & brand awareness, as much as a specific event
- Switch 2 is out in time for S8
Even if your rule of thumb is sound, I think you make the error of counting the ‘concurrent players’ as the ‘daily players’. I’m sure that’s not how that works.
Afaik Steam API doesn’t tell us how many players logged in that day.
Summary
If a player logs out & another player logs in, that number stays the same. So there’s no way to know how many individual accounts logged in on any given day, much less over the course of the week, much less the season. We can only be sure that the daily logins are far more numerous than the concurrent ones - b/c simply, people are constantly logging out (they have IRL stuff to do). And the accounts logging in during the season are even more numerous than this because quite simply, not everyone gets on board at the start of the season. They have two months to jump in.
Moving on, from another angle: D4 probably sold 10-12 million copies in year 1.
Summary
I think there’s huge growth potential in the target demo (‘couch dads with controllers’). So I’m willing to bet discount bundles, strong marketing, word of mouth, and lack of competition in casual-friendly dungeon crawlers with co-op… yielded several million more (base game sales) in year 2. But let’s be extremely conservative/cynical & assume as many people uninstalled & permanently abandoned D4 as picked it up.
That still means 10-12 million are ‘around’. And to get at a figure of 200k total seasonal players, that would be a S8 attrition rate of 98%. I’m going to go ahead and dismiss that out of hand. It didn’t happen.
Idk how many people are logging in over the course of the season, but it’s probably in the millions (worldwide). I also think the target demo is, on average, less uptight about MTX than the ‘savvy arpg player’.
And now the seasonal/BP cosmetics are no longer restricted to seasonal players - they’re on Eternal as well … people who play steadily all year round but now suddenly have added ‘opportunity’ to spend more on cosmetics, and are probably much more likely than average to do so. They’re a special bunch with special habits.
Vs your estimate of $50,000 the reality could be $1,000,000 (that’s if only 38k buy it - which I suspect is a vast underestimate). It’s probably much more lucrative than that.
Two more things:
Summary
- The Marketing budget goes to promoting the game - so as long as there’s an ad cycle, Marketing has campaigns lined up. Any ad campaign is a promotion of the game’s existence - it catches the eye, and subsequent ads/prompts tempt future buyers. The effect is cumulative. That’s why an event would have to be an extraordinary failure to render the ad investment a ‘waste’. It’s doing its job year-round.
- It’s mostly about license sales, not MTX, which are a garnish. The collab is to give the game exposure, & nab some new players in the target demo & other markets.
- Ok 3 things: Switch 2 is coming. Supply chain problems aside, D4 is a launch title. That means S8 has a few weeks in the 2nd half, in which 10s of 1000s of new accounts will log in. And remember: they’re all weebs & they read manga. That alone might ‘pay for’ that ad campaign.
