It’s that time again.
Time to document how the ARPG genre is going…
Path of Exile - 123,000 current players (with a new all time peak of 228,000)
Showing that the interest for PoE is still growing even after a terrible June with the lowest numbers in 10 years. Maybe we are seeing PoE 2 expectations driving players.
Last Epoch - 5,000 current players
Not odd numbers. Still inside of we can expect from LE numbers untill they do something trully remarkable.
Diablo IV - 17,000 current players
Not as good as last season, but still good numbers. Still think that the numbers aren’t reflecting the Steam sales yet. We have the season launch increase, but nothing spectacular. We may have a good notion of what is really happening on Steam side when they launch the expansion. There we will see how good Steam numbers really are.
Honorable mention: Wolcen - 55 current players. Grim Dawn - 1900 current players.
I would definitely say so. They also released an expansion, not just a season, and I was told that release is a quasi beta test for systems that will be in PoE 2.
PoE has a more hardcore fanbase. You can see that on twitch numbers as well.
PoE had over 200k viewers on release while D4 had 60k.
But its simply a more fun game to watch because more stuff can happen, more hype moments. While D4 is very streamlined, theres very little lows and highs from a viewers perspective. You know exactly whats going to happen. Getting a mythic unique is the most exciting thing, and thats not exactly very hype.
Nothing wild about it. D4 didn’t start on steam and most of the people who bought it didn’t want to pay for another copy just to play on steam. I’d bet most people use Battle.net because that’s all it was on at launch when like 10 million people purchased it. Then there are a ton in console too and now game pass.
i think a more useful interpretation of the steamdb numbers would be to use them to compare their seasons, to their peaknumbers, giving a more meaningful insight into retention and if players like where it is going.
because comparing numbers between games is kinda moot since
D4 is like ~90%(just guessing no idea, but it will be the majority) battlenet launcher
POE is around 50/50 Steam/standalone launcher
while LE is only on steam i think.
not to mention both POE and D4 also have a console version.
looking at it like that:
POE set a new peak this season, so they are doing something right.
D4 hit 27,5k with a peak on S4 of 40k, still 70% returned for S5, i guess a few are waiting for VoH, and S5 seemed fine to skip.
LE season hit 70k players with a release peak of 264k, not that great only around a quarter returned.
bumping this thread each new season of any game as a “haha gotcha” is kinda pointless.
it’s kinda hard to compare games where one of them has x100 marketing budget. So some numbers are acceptable for poe/le/whatever and a huge failure for d4.
50-50 poe standalone and steam. Im not sure about that. Back in the day we had so many issues with the standalone client getting corrupted and you had to redownload the whole thing, this made many ppl transition over steam. In fact all my friends who played poe on standalone client including me all moved to steam. Better and faster patching , files never got corrupted. So imho saying 50-50 is long gone. More like 75-25 in Steams favor.
i remember the devs stating 50/50 a while back, but not “back in the day” and i think you have it backwards, steam used to redownload the whole game every single patch even small hotfixes and the standalone didn’t. can’t talk about any corrupted files since that never happend to me or anyone i know.
but hey, i looked it up, new numbers, this league their twitter said: “new record: over 350k”
and steamdb has the peak at 229k giving us a 65% steam and 35% standalone ratio.
not that this has anything to do with the point i made, which was “don’t compare absolute numbers between games, compare the games to themselves over time to see a positive/negative trend”
Who cares? Play what you like. The whole “live service/seasonal” model is really just a tactic used to drip feed content to players while hoping to hit quarterly targets by selling battlepasses.
For the most part you’re still doing the same activities over and over. Personally speaking-D4 is the most egregious offender here, but the customer base has allowed it to happen. The current and previous season have been primarily just fixing the base game with 1 additional activity tacked on. Don’t forget to pick up those shiny cosmetics in the battlepass!
I don’t mind doing something over and over, when it’s fun. In D4, so many little things annoy me all the time. For ex. all those damn, little pop-ups all over the place. Even in D3 it was done better. In D2 there was nothing like that.
would like it to play d4 on steam but not going to buy the game a second time to do that and since they won’t let you play it on steam unless you buy it there i guess it wont happen.