I don’t understand why everyone is so focused on how many copy’s of DF were sold. There is only one thing that matters. Are you having fun? It doesn’t matter how many copy’s are sold. I get that people don’t want to invest time in a dying game, but the game does not seem like it is having that issue at the moment. So just have fun, and don’t worry about who is or isn’t. Make your own decisions.
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It only matters to the extent that you can find people to play or interact with. Seems to be plenty of those at the moment.
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Yeah, I don’t care about the number sold. I’ve never seen so many groups for so many activities the the group finder and that’s enough for me to be satisfied.
Kinda matters to know how many people playing your game.
I wish we had stats back where we had relatively accurate race and faction numbers.
It matters because that is how mmos slowly die. Life support mode and all that.
First the numbers drop, after that the content patches become worse and worse, and take longer and longer to come out.
Numbers will always matter.
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everyone wants to be popular, so they want to make sure they chose the most popular game in an unpopular genre.
realistically an mmo can thrive with only a few thousand players - at least from a player point of view, if wow ever dipped under 1mil total subs there’d probably be some pretty big fallout from actiblizz higher ups.
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Numbers matter because it affects player perception.
Player perception matters because it affects whether they want to invest time and money into the game.
Investing time and money into the game is how the game continues to exist.
If numbers are bad, people are less likely to continue playing, or to start playing.
If numbers are good, people are more likely to continue playing or to start playing.
So, that’s why the standard is to go to some truly absurd lengths to try hiding those numbers from you and to meet the minimum legal requirements by telling investors “monthly active users” instead of subscribers.
There’s lots of guestimates out there, and occasionally they let slip the actual numbers, like when they accidentally put subscription expiration dates in the API (count the dates, and you count the subs) which let the game’s data analysts like Raider IO calculate it accurately, but again they fix these leaks quickly and go to great lengths to obscure their numbers from view.
Imagine going in to a hospital and asking your surgeon “You’ve personally done this surgery a lot of times right doctor?” and he answers your direct question with “Well… let me tell you about the number of patients this hospital and all the other hospitals in this network perform any surgeries at all on and you’ll notice that our surgery numbers are extremely high for hospitals in our area that perform surgeries in a non-pandemic year when compared to hospitals located in Wyoming in years that had pandemics which are located in networks outside of this one.”
So… yeah.
You can say a lot about numbers without saying anyting at all, and that’s what not only Blizzard, but most of the industry does.
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Metrics metrics and…metrics, oh did i mention metrics?
Company preformance both internal and external are based on a host of metrics such as subscribers, time played, RTM/shop sales and the list goes on.
When a metric is made srrictly internal, as subscriber numbers, there is a reason behind this. Marketing experts would prob have a theory as to why.
Because they think DF copies sold = how popular DF was. it isn’t.
A lot of people love to want to see the game fail. They’re upset that the game isn’t designed exactly to their personal wishes, and think poor sales will scare the devs into making the game the way they want it. Not taking into account how many thousands or millions of others all want things changed in very specific ways.
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