Is steam charts a true depiction of players?

I just checked the charts for poe and it had just a little over 5k players from 158k when the league started.

I know this is the way it is every, single, league. BUT...is this where POE is headed? To almost nothingness? How can they retain retention? I'm just curious how they manage to keep going. Can't be making much money from just a few thousand players. Every new league there is something "new" but gets boring really fast.

This isn't a rant, just making an observation and asking a question.

Their money is made from people playing the game 24/7 for the first few weeks of a league, buying the supporter packs, getting bored and then waiting for the next league start.

Its a cruel cycle.

Huge spikes and equally huge dips are built into the financial model of the game's release cycle. PoE isn't about retention day to day or week to week, but league to league. As long as each league release sees a huge spike and that spike reflects financial support, the dips could be literally zero and it doesn't really matter. Conversely, there could be no dip at all but if financial contributions themselves became near zero past the first few weeks, then, technically, it's the exact same situation.

In other words, don't conflate player concurrency trends with 'retention' beyond the spikes. It's when those spikes start to noticeably drop that you should be concerned, again assuming said drop reflects a proportionate drop in support pack sales.

And not even that's an assumption I'd be willing to make given only GGG really have access to that sort of statistic. The closest we can get is to look at the company's financial records here.

And to absolutely no one's surprise, they're doing just fine.

Which in turn means that while you might see a problem, those making the decisions likely don't.

In addition to above, GGG tend to mention two statistics that they focus on (which must be their own internal metrics for growth).

1) Active current users (this is apparently over 2million... last stated a couple of years ago so probably much higher now). This is probably those that have logged in within the last 3 months or so.

2) Concurrent players. They obviously want more people on at the same time, and celebrate when they hit new records. They last broke this record back in February.

So all in all, the game is very healthy and continually growing.

Don't listen to the naysayers who like to spread FUD.

No. Steam charts do not account for the nonsteam players.

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DreadLordAvatar написал:

No. Steam charts do not account for the nonsteam players.

While true, there's probably a ratio of Steam:Standalone that is pretty constant, so the steam numbers are representative of the actual numbers.
Of course we don't know that, and we don't know how many people use the standalone client (GGG would know, however).
I'm pretty sure that while steam numbers don't give you the actual real numbery numbers, they give you good idea about the general trend.
Unless the standalone players have hugely differing habits of playing.

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Mikrotherion написал:

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DreadLordAvatar написал:

No. Steam charts do not account for the nonsteam players.

Of course we don't know that, and we don't know how many people use the standalone client (GGG would know, however).

You can derive that information. It's pretty much been constantly just under "double" the steam chart to get total players.

Eg Siege of the Atlas had:

270,260 concurrent active players (as stated by GGG themselves).
158,140 concurrent active players on Steam

So that gives you a ratio of 1.70 to get total players. It seems to have been pretty constant around that mark over the years.

Note that those numbers are just concurrent players. Total active POE players is in the millions (albeit some just log on for a day every now and then).

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Mikrotherion написал:

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DreadLordAvatar написал:

No. Steam charts do not account for the nonsteam players.

While true, there's probably a ratio of Steam:Standalone that is pretty constant, so the steam numbers are representative of the actual numbers.
Of course we don't know that, and we don't know how many people use the standalone client (GGG would know, however).
I'm pretty sure that while steam numbers don't give you the actual real numbery numbers, they give you good idea about the general trend.
Unless the standalone players have hugely differing habits of playing.

Very much this. It's easy to mock steamcharts as an incomplete picture but at this point I'd say you've the right of it. Which brings something else up of relevance: steam is ALL ABOUT tempting you to play different games. Constantly advertising sales and free weekends and whatnot. I have a pretty modest steam folder and it's still several dozen games. So player retention is not only precarious, it's actively being challenged by the very platform a lot of people use for gaming.

Still, most of the Exiles I've got on my steam friendslist probably use the standalone client because I usually see them playing other things and even then, fairly rarely. :)

Steam numbers are reliable unless there is a credible reason why a Steam user differs from a non Steam user, the data set is already far larger than is generally used to produce statistics.

Other questions should be asked though like why do some players care so much about end of league stats, realistically the numbers would need to be split up by week andd then conclusions drawn with comparison to the same split in prior releases.

I'd argue that initial peak and 2 week retention is GGG's model with higher numbers afterwards being largely irrelevant aside from indications about content/league quality this time round.

This might be 3 or 4 weeks even we are unlikely to find out but its extremely unlikely that they factor in past the half way point of a league. Why? Because the numbers are consistently much lower than peak and they never do anything to assist retention outside of the end of year events.

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fuzzyrat1234 написал:

I just checked the charts for poe and it had just a little over 5k players from 158k when the league started.

I know this is the way it is every, single, league. BUT...is this where POE is headed? To almost nothingness? How can they retain retention? I'm just curious how they manage to keep going. Can't be making much money from just a few thousand players. Every new league there is something "new" but gets boring really fast.

This isn't a rant, just making an observation and asking a question.

A lot of people uses ggg launcher, so it's deffinetly more than 5k.

GGG themselves stated that they have no intention to keep all players playing for full 3 months of the league, they expect a player to play for ~1month, take 2 months break (play smth else), and the come back for a new league. Cycle repeats 4times a year. And it's working perfectly.

New league will come - again we will see some 170k steam players, half of which will never even complete act1 (game hoppers).