On Starfield’s ‘Plummeting’ Playercount 80 Days After Launch
While this specific article became a meme, it is also a frequent PlayStation die-hard argument I’ve heard over the past month or two, and I really do think Starfield is doing a lot better than people think.
Why would anyone think the playercount matters for a single player game? This article is silly.
It's the "forever game" brainrot. Nowadays people expect games to be updated and played forever as the one game they will play. Even single player games.
This mindset sort of originated from MMORPGs but leeched into other games including singleplayer ones. Just look at how people approach playing singleplayer Minecraft. Or Zelda TOTK. They act like the game is shit because they got bored of it like no shit, you have 500 hours in Zelda TOTK. Learn to put down a game. Minecraft is even more extreme. People are expecting the game to remain appealing in single player a good decade after it's initial release.
People need to understand that they're allowed to get bored of a game and move on to the next one. That their refusal to move on way beyond the games intended lifespan does not mean that a game is bad.
So the reason why the plummeting playercount is "bad", is because it makes it less likely for DLC and updates being pushed which are required to maintain a "forever game"
Kinda disagree with the Minecraft comparison, I got it in beta a millenia ago, and still play it. no idea about all this new shit they've released since (as an example, I've never touched redstone), I just like to start a world in survival and go explore (and die. Lots).
In general, media tracks the player count less to talk about content generation and more to talk about success of a game and its development. This is especially true with publishers that don’t release their figures or when the sales figures are somewhat irrelevant because of game pass. Player count is the bar by which games can be measured easily.
Also it sets up industry expectations for sequels and the overall health of publishers and developers. It’s a big deal when a recent Microsoft acquisition puts out a game to a very dull response and loses player count quickly. Add in the whole Redfall thing and it’s an embarassing turnout for Zenimax and Bethesda. So no, this is a big deal especially to people who work for those studios. It has far less to do with content extension for the game in question and more to do with how acquisitions are awful for the games industry.
That's kinda what the article says though
It can be an indicator of post-launch performance. In this case, it performed well at launch but has now stablised like most games do. By my metrics, 30k a day is pretty good at a glance. You'd have to find more actual comparisons to make informed conclusions though, which you sort of find if you go through Forbes' source which is a quote tweet of an article from GamingBolt ( just link the article lmao):
Cyberpunk 2077 may have seen a major new update and a paid expansion, Phantom Liberty, but that was in September. It’s sitting at 23rd in the most-played games chart on Steam, with a 24-hour peak of 36,246. Starfield is currently in 43rd place behind games like Elden Ring, Valheim, Stardew Valley and Terraria.
There are more paragraphs with the same vibe, with the obvious disclaimer that it's on game pass too. But there's a number of other things that would go into an actual performance analysis. e.g, are the "competing" games currently on sale? What other factors affect the current landscape of games played? What do each of these games' numbers look like in the same time period following their launch?
That's the kind of data the publishers have access to and do actual analysis on. I think this reporting is just chasing a trend for engagement. 22 - 30k is not bad for a singleplayer game without mod support (yet) which people will pick up, play, and put down. I don't see anything to indicate it's "in trouble" (we'd probably have heard by now of internal planning changes at Bethesda if that were the case).
Actually, the article linked is pretty much making the point that the player numbers don't matter that much. Or at least that all the trolls using those numbers as evidence are at the very least, premature.
It's one of the very few indicators we have, and pretty much the only one that's not controlled by the publisher or devs.
I'm still waiting for a bigger patch. I think they've been uncharacteristically slow at putting out fixes and that has cost them player count. Nothing they cant still fix. If I were them I wouldn't release any content patches to get players back until the base game is less buggy. Might make players dismiss the game entirely if they return and the same bugs are there.
Yup, pretty similar to Cyberpunk... really rough launch state with the potential to be an amazing game in the long run. The eternal question, though, us whether it'll get the love it needs.
@emptyother @ylai Yeah I don't understand why they're so slow at pushing updates out. Could they be preparing a big one ?
Starfield was a let down, but I think people weren't meant to see player count data.
Every discussion related to player count is pointless and muddled by questionable data collection methods and wild assumptions.
I was bummed out with this game. You can't even fly your ship to different locations. You quick travel. I do not care if space is big, I want to fly over to my next spot manually
It's interesting to see compared to skyrim or fallout where in a lot of cases you would fast travel. But without having a choice the immersion is entirely gone
It's the 2D map plane vs the "4D" map plane issue.
With the 2D plane, you can very easily see points of interest and just walk right over to them. Easy, immersive, entertaining.
Starfield has this "4D" plane of a world where you have the map full of systems to go to, that you can only get to with fast travel. And you're not picking them because they catch your eye, they're just dots on a map. And then you have each planet, again as places on a map, with no real indicators of interest. Then you fast travel down to the planet and find that there really is nothing of interest, which Bethesda has said is by design.
There's no organic discovery because 1) there's nothing to discover and 2) it's all facilitated through maps and fast travel.
I never fast traveled in Fall Out or Skyrim. At least, not until late late endgame.
You can actually do that, it just takes forever. Why there is no option to fly manually there faster though is anyone's guess.
I'll come back when modders make the game that we were expecting... basically probably what most are waiting for
I always thought the play with Bethesda games was "wait until the second or third GotY Special Edition release so you don't get quadruple dipped on season passes and stuff packs; then boot your load order organizer of choice and stuff it sideways with Nexus content" anyway; you mean there's really people who year zero'd Starfield?
After 300 hours there isn’t much to do. Maybe even after 150 hours there is nothing much to do but I spent a lot of time in the ship builder and trying to make outposts works (the system is shit).
I don’t see how modding the game is going to help unless you can fly your ship around the planets and stars. Maybe make the POIs harder with more space pirates? Planetary vehicles? Be able to exit your ship in space?
They really left out all of the stuff that people wanted. 8 years of making a shell of a space game. Crazy.
Anyway, Star Citizen plays much better with 3.21 on my 3070 and that’s where I spend my space time nowadays but don’t you come join because the servers can’t handle a lot of people.
Planetary vehicles seems like such an obvious missing feature. They must have figured out it was too hard to do in their engine or had other technical reasons for omitting them. Every time I'm mindlessly running for several kilometers of procedural bland terrain I wish that could be a more fun experience.
Bethesda needs to learn how to make character designs and animations that at least look more realistic than mark Zuckerberg. Maybe also stop being so utterly deluded but that's a big ask.
That Phil guy for the List quest was so creepy to interact with; staring eyes and a big grin for no reason. It bugs me that every character in starfield stares directly at the camera. In Skyrim, the npc would often continue what they were doing when talking (such as continuing to blacksmith)
If they fix the bug that makes the game crash when I load my 100h save, I might go back.
I’ve reported it before the latest patch. Sent a reminder on the report once a week for 4-5 weeks. Finally they responded with “have you tried it since the patch”? Ffs YES I HAVE! Just fix the damn thing…
Thats save bloat. It technically affects all games with a save system, but bethesda games can get hit hard because it saves the locations of every object in every cell you visit.
I don’t see how that could be a problem. The save file is about 7Mb, it takes a tiny amount of RAM to hold it.
Thats cause Starfield is a 70 dollar game, with 10 hours of poorly made content, that they expect you to replay 10+ times to get the strongest stuff for internet bragging points.