Who the Heck Cares About Player Counts? | Unpacked

I think that for single player, it really doesn't matter. This information wouldn't be available for a lot of old 'cult-classics' but something that sprang to mind was No More Heroes. A game that I don't think more than 1000 people have every been playing at the same time and was popular on one console mostly, but that has 3 sequels. Location is also important. The Yakuza franchise sold incredibly poorly in the west until Yakuza 0, but this was the sixth game in the (main-line) franchise; if people had only focused on Western players it would have been declared a failure. But "Game isn't for everyone but sells modestly and seems to be enjoyed" isn't a compelling headline.

Spicy topic, I like it. Of course, devil is in details. Some type of multiplayer is very player number dependant. Some are not. However single player game active play counts means zero. Sold copies does.

Concur with everything you said. It's just the hype train's' caboose dumping shit after the hype ends. But I have to digress to the fade in between the t shirt ad and the opening for unpacked. That was great! I really liked it.

I thought the player count thing was gamers more or less letting the tone of discourse be set/astroturfed by game companies and publishers with the aid of complicit games media outfits and influencers, to obfuscate their own big fails or significant underperformers like say, Starfield, where actual sales didn't look super rosy, in the context of a major Bethesda release, but if you added in game pass player numbers it made the game look like it was doing quite well. Then various flavors of grifter found they had a new set of numbers to paint their narrative of choice with, and reddit followed because. Reddit. Of course the actual numbers taken the right way can in fact tell us some interesting things, even for single player games, but mostly over time. If a single player game has a sharp and rapid drop off or a gentle decline for example, or drops from the peak (obviously) and maintains a strong daily population. It doesn't tell the whole story, but can indicate something interesting is afoot.

Gamers will always find something to argue about. I remember the Atari vs Intellivision vs Coleco debates, the C64/Spectrum and Amiga/Atari wars, Nintendo vs Sega... all fundamentally based on the need to demonstrate why my favourite thing is better than your favourite thing. It won't be ending any time soon. Player counts are just a means to that end.

I'll agree that player counts for a single player game is pretty dumb. Just talk about sales numbers like everyone else or something. At least it has a kernel of truth for Multiplayer games. A MP game (even if we ignore the F2P aspect driving microtransactions for the moment) needs a certain number of players so that you can have good matchmaking times and experiences. If you bought a MP game that is "actually" dead, well... enjoy your matches with Bots. With all the focus on "dead game" it ignores the actually important question which is: how many players you need to have an enjoyable experience. I don't actually know how many you need, but it is far less than the hyperbole would have you believe. No one tries to answer that question though. Also thank you for sneaking in the Starfox 64 Promotional Ad.

It will never stop boggling my mind that I see people started making threads/discussions on games dying when they have healthy player bases. 1-2 weeks after launch, people did it with NightReign and I can't help but laugh at it. Yes, multiplayer games live and die based on their player base but often times people don't bother to even consider minimum number of players required to enjoy a single match. The lower that number is the lower the player count can dip and still be healthy, if not thriving. Ease to fill a lobby, time it takes from queue to match start, fan communities that will hop in to play when asked, are all needed to get a general feel of a games state. Also seeing posts about player count dropping on single player games is gonna put me in the looney bin. Of course it will fall off, people will finish games and move on. Or bounce off and move on, or like Nick said, put it in their backlog. "Oh man, the sales of this hit new game have started to dwindle. Must mean it is losing its appeal and has begun to fail." Or maybe people who would buy it near launch now have it and there is only so many people in the world who were desperate to pick it up ASAP. Gaming F2P may have been a mistake or Games as a Service was a mistake. Trying to turn every single thing into a perpetual motion machine to print money and keep people engaged feels violently destructive. I almost want to compare it to slash and burn farming, where you keep destroying fertile areas by razing it then farm until the soil lacks nutrients to then move on to the next fertile area. With no concern to the environment, ecosystem, or sustainability. Burn out becomes quite a fitting term when using this metaphor, I guess. Sorry for rambling. XD

Time elapsed, initial sales for single-purchase titles, and on-sale frequency length are also things people tend to ignore when talking about these titles. On the surface, you'd think Battlefront 2 is still doing incredibly well but you'd be ignoring how it only hit its newest all-time high after a 90% sale where the game was only $4. Making the argument for single player games succeeding/failing based on this is foolish, simple as. Multiplayer games are a bit more complicated. These massive drop offs are natural, of course, as games don't sustain those numbers for very long but there is something to note when an online title loses so much of its playerbase that it effectively ceases to function. It's hard to play an online game when no one else is. Of course, that's rarely something you can determine through percentiles and more with raw numbers. A game with 20k players that launched with 200k players is doing a lot better than a title that has 2k players and launched with 10k players