Just looked at steam player Data

its downhill from 3.13, although i liked ultimatum mechanic and taunting dude... scourge was sort of cool also, but krangler had to be polished, however my big problem with the game is lack of skill/build diversity/viability and boring and super expensive crafting. also lack of currency - i seriously doubt more than 2-3% of players are doing some 50ex crafts. playing a lot and doing decently juiced maps drops me around 25-35ex per league so i cant even craft one item myself. and dont get me started on campaign drops...

ggg and veterans are exploiting new and less informed players, but that hardly a recipe for success...

end result is handful of people playing the same skill and character builds over and over again.

doesnt even look like an elitist game to me, more like an addiction.

oh and arch nemesis mods looks like going back to stone age with reflect mobs.

A sharp dropoff after a successful league start does not mean anything anymore. The new marketing model for content releases simply does not care about player retention, but rather about shared profits between the game studio and its corporate partners (in this case Twitch and Tencent) during the launch window.

The product is no longer the game. The product is the consumer expectations that generate clicks, views, and microtransactions. It is disingenuous to point to player count and say the league is a flop. We simply do not have access to the data that matters, i.e. Twitch traffic and pre- and at-point MTX sales.

Arguably the best success this league has had, began several days BEFORE league even launched, with the Twitch drops. Again, in the absence of numbers, I cannot say it was the best consumer response rate ahead of a league ever, but anecdotally word on the street was that the wings were a good value and worth registering your Twitch account and following a streamer to obtain. Timed as it was within a week before launch, many people who had recently engaged with Twitch to get the wings, were still present to fuel views and clicks on opening day. That is perhaps the number that we should be comparing season to season, instead of player head count. (Because we can all agree the actual game is not for everyone's tastes, but it takes no special effort to engage with Twitch or buy a supporter pack.)

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crunkatog wrote:

A sharp dropoff after a successful league start does not mean anything anymore. The new marketing model for content releases simply does not care about player retention, but rather about shared profits between the game studio and its corporate partners (in this case Twitch and Tencent) during the launch window.

The product is no longer the game. The product is the consumer expectations that generate clicks, views, and microtransactions. It is disingenuous to point to player count and say the league is a flop. We simply do not have access to the data that matters, i.e. Twitch traffic and pre- and at-point MTX sales.

Arguably the best success this league has had, began several days BEFORE league even launched, with the Twitch drops. Again, in the absence of numbers, I cannot say it was the best consumer response rate ahead of a league ever, but anecdotally word on the street was that the wings were a good value and worth registering your Twitch account and following a streamer to obtain. Timed as it was within a week before launch, many people who had recently engaged with Twitch to get the wings, were still present to fuel views and clicks on opening day. That is perhaps the number that we should be comparing season to season, instead of player head count. (Because we can all agree the actual game is not for everyone's tastes, but it takes no special effort to engage with Twitch or buy a supporter pack.)

I'm impressed how clearly you described it without using the word 'bubble' even once, because that's a bubble waiting to burst if I ever saw one.

I'd add to this and note that with very few exceptions, you can't refund a supporter pack. So as long as those spikes are still happening, as long as people are supporting out of habit, desire for shinies, supporter title addiction (I see you, J-man), whatever reason...it really doesn't matter who's still around even a few weeks into a league. Unless there's a correlation between the increasingly swift and severe drop-offs and a reduction in returners next league. I could see that being a legitimate issue.

I wasn't really paying attention; did GGG proudly announce the concurrency of this league's launch yet?

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crunkatog wrote:

A sharp dropoff after a successful league start does not mean anything anymore. The new marketing model for content releases simply does not care about player retention, but rather about shared profits between the game studio and its corporate partners (in this case Twitch and Tencent) during the launch window.

The product is no longer the game. The product is the consumer expectations that generate clicks, views, and microtransactions. It is disingenuous to point to player count and say the league is a flop. We simply do not have access to the data that matters, i.e. Twitch traffic and pre- and at-point MTX sales.

Arguably the best success this league has had, began several days BEFORE league even launched, with the Twitch drops. Again, in the absence of numbers, I cannot say it was the best consumer response rate ahead of a league ever, but anecdotally word on the street was that the wings were a good value and worth registering your Twitch account and following a streamer to obtain. Timed as it was within a week before launch, many people who had recently engaged with Twitch to get the wings, were still present to fuel views and clicks on opening day. That is perhaps the number that we should be comparing season to season, instead of player head count. (Because we can all agree the actual game is not for everyone's tastes, but it takes no special effort to engage with Twitch or buy a supporter pack.)

Yeah I mentioned before they no longer care about player retention and just basing their profit model over those few weeks leading up and maybe 1-2 weeks after at most. It's sad in many ways, fast-food mentality where you can't rely on your product for very long.

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Reid777 wrote:

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Junkkis wrote:

its low becouse elder ring 2 and Lost ark 2 just started? :p

Don't get bated, data is not significantly worse than last few leagues.

because player retention in the past few leagues since 3.15 has been in the toilet too.

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darciaz wrote:

I don’t think steam charts and indicative of much besides steam players don’t hold out with games long. I mean, we have no data for standalone client.

so what. most people play on the steam client so it's very much indicative.

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crunkatog wrote:

A sharp dropoff after a successful league start does not mean anything anymore. The new marketing model for content releases simply does not care about player retention, but rather about shared profits between the game studio and its corporate partners (in this case Twitch and Tencent) during the launch window.

The product is no longer the game. The product is the consumer expectations that generate clicks, views, and microtransactions. It is disingenuous to point to player count and say the league is a flop. We simply do not have access to the data that matters, i.e. Twitch traffic and pre- and at-point MTX sales.

Arguably the best success this league has had, began several days BEFORE league even launched, with the Twitch drops. Again, in the absence of numbers, I cannot say it was the best consumer response rate ahead of a league ever, but anecdotally word on the street was that the wings were a good value and worth registering your Twitch account and following a streamer to obtain. Timed as it was within a week before launch, many people who had recently engaged with Twitch to get the wings, were still present to fuel views and clicks on opening day. That is perhaps the number that we should be comparing season to season, instead of player head count. (Because we can all agree the actual game is not for everyone's tastes, but it takes no special effort to engage with Twitch or buy a supporter pack.)

Except GGG isn't making any money from Twitch directly, it's the opposite, they are spending money on it. The official GGG streams aren't monetized (there are no ads) and don't earn any money for Amazon or GGG, the twitch drops program is to boost interest in viewing the game and no money is spent or earned on it (any developer can create drops for their game for free), then GGG is paying streamers to play their game at league start. It's a win-win for GGG and Amazon but there are no kickbacks, GGG doesn't get any money from people watching their game. The entire point of GGG feeding money into twitch and streamers is to get more players so they sell more supporter packs. They might be selling supporter packs to new players they rope in from the twitch campaigns but if those players are leaving quickly after league start then they aren't likely to come back and spend more money. Player retention is still absolutely vital to the long term survival of the game.

why some people making it not a big deal? this is a basic thing that anyone not being fully into development of games or marketing knows about unless you live under a rock..

reddit earlier making a thread making fun of the steam charts..

see how it is going now..

36,294 already from 131,010 on day 4 out of 90

and that is from only ONE platform alone.. too bad those other places standard alone client and epic games numbers is something that we might never get access to..

what else do you need to figure it out? the majority dislikes the patch/direction.. happy for you if you're enjoying the league but think freely.

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Draegnarrr wrote:

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DiabloImmoral wrote:

They lied and promised a league of no nerfs and nerfed players by like 80%. Chris actually made me touch grass on a league start weekend.

I don't blame people for taking a 3 month break. It's the perfect time to do it. Beta testing for the new mods should be done in August for the new league.

I think this ones a little unfair, though personally I think trying to placate your player base on balance is a fools errand anyway - just make the changes that need making.

That being said it was obvious that replacing rare mods with AN mods was going to be a "nerf" as your putting it whereas Chris was clearly talking about character balance specifically not the all encompassing way you can apply "nerf".

Statistically an EA ballista character in the same equipment to 3.17 is the same character this time, that was the no changes.

Correct, I think one of the main issues was the lack of clearly explaining what was going to happen and managing expectations.

Instead of saying, "No nerrfs!, you can start building your PoB now". They should have said "these are archnemesis changes are so big and so game-changing that we're not doing any netfs or balance changes because the outcome be can't be calculated, we may need to do some heavy patching in the first couple weeks".

The vision of what they wanted was far grander than the reality of its implementation. Kind of like Obamacare, instead of lowering everyone's cost by $500 it raised everyone's cost by $3,500.

I personally can´t ignore the steady decline in retention earlier and earlier anymore. But I in fact do not agree with a lot of sentiment mentioned here: For me this is not poor vision, poor business or poor anything other than their obviously stupid alpha-testing-programm.

In the past I´ve read that Alpha-Testers only get very limited access to new content because they tend to leak stuff. So GGG: Stop fucking around and FIRE THEM and hire people that actually do not leak bullshit, if needed via contracts.

It is about time that you develop a SERIOUS Testing-Programm for new content, as this has shown once more that the current system of pretesting is absolute garbage and does not accurately checks all the boxes that need to be checked when it comes to such a complicated game where tons of mechanics interact with each other.

Don´t fix the vision, make sure it actually makes it into the game instead of that overtuned bullshit that you just oversaw due to very bad testing. I know a lot of people - myself included - that indeed like the game to be challenging, but hitting a metamorph for 7 minutes straight while being one-tapped if he turns around once while also only dropping one organ and nothing else important is not worth the hassle and therefore very discouraging.

With the 2nd patch the metamorphs are far more feasable, so you indeed seem to understand the problems very quickly, so why is it so difficult to do this beforehand for once?