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Monday, January 08, 2024
Player engagement
It took World of Warcraft 5 years of growth before it peaked during Cataclysm at 12 million subscribers. A few other games have also become cultural phenomena and kept player counts up for many years, for example Fortnite. But the large majority of games peaks very shortly after release, and lose over 90% of players in a month or three. Even the so-called "live service games", which are designed to be played for a long time, often fail to hold onto players for very long.
This weekend at peak nearly 300k players were playing Baldur's Gate 3 on Steam. That is over a third of its peak concurrent player number. And that isn't even counting console players. As Paul Tassi remarks, that is pretty crazy for a single player game which isn't a live service game at all. Baldur's Gate 3 doesn't have a DLC, nor a battle pass, and patches only added little new content. But it easily beats most live service games in longevity.
While I do accept "you can't use Baldur's Gate 3 as a standard for every game" from smaller developers, that excuse is frankly ridiculous when it comes from companies like Blizzard. Diablo IV crashed rather quickly, despite being designed as a long-lasting live service game. Clearly Blizzard has the means to make better games with longer player engagement, and has done so in the past. Maybe now Bobby Kotick is gone, Activision Blizzard should take a long hard look at how they made games in the past, and how they are doing recently, and decide on changing some things. And there are a bunch of other big game companies that should do the same. It isn't enough to make mediocre games, slap a battle pass onto them, and hope that money will flow forever.
If Larian wanted, they could easily monetize their player engagement by releasing a DLC for Baldur's Gate 3 every 6 months. The possibility of ongoing monetization is *not* limited to mediocre cookie cutter games. The trick is to first make a great game, and then worry about ongoing monetization later.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:44 AM Permanent Link
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Tolbold: "Activision Blizzard should take a long hard look at how they made games in the past, [...]"
Stress is on "past". You can't make games like you did 20 years ago when the whole environment was different and you fell right in the lucky spot.
When WoW launched, the Internet began shifting to a flat rate model, online interaction was mostly blogs and forums and people in the prime age group were from a different era.
WoW offered simple communication and exploration which made for a great social construct.
Today if you want to talk to your friends or strangers, you have a million ways to do so.
There is not much exploration as you can just google stuff or watch a video on it - and the people grew up with that mindset of not having to explore beyond a google search.
So no, I don't think there is much in the past you can copy as player engagement is different.
Stress is on "past". You can't make games like you did 20 years ago when the whole environment was different and you fell right in the lucky spot.
When WoW launched, the Internet began shifting to a flat rate model, online interaction was mostly blogs and forums and people in the prime age group were from a different era.
WoW offered simple communication and exploration which made for a great social construct.
Today if you want to talk to your friends or strangers, you have a million ways to do so.
There is not much exploration as you can just google stuff or watch a video on it - and the people grew up with that mindset of not having to explore beyond a google search.
So no, I don't think there is much in the past you can copy as player engagement is different.
" It isn't enough to make mediocre games, slap a battle pass onto them, and hope that money will flow forever."
Maybe not, but it's definitely enough to do exactly that and expect to make a decent return on your investment from the initial sale, then go on to make your next game. And if 10% of players who bought the last one want to keep playing it, it doesn't cost all that much to service their needs and make a continuing profit from them, too.
Seems like a reasonable business plan.
Maybe not, but it's definitely enough to do exactly that and expect to make a decent return on your investment from the initial sale, then go on to make your next game. And if 10% of players who bought the last one want to keep playing it, it doesn't cost all that much to service their needs and make a continuing profit from them, too.
Seems like a reasonable business plan.
Well, wouldn't Baldur's Gate 3's longevity be in part due to the amount of hours of content available? If howlongtobeat.com is to be believed, the amount of hours of content it has meets or exceeds live service games.
@Jerwin: I think the secret is the number of hours of *non-repeating* content Baldur's Gate 3 has. Theoretically Starfield has 1,000 planets and Diablo IV has an infinite number of dungeons, but all of that is procedurally generated and gets boring rather quickly.
Tobold: "I think the secret is the number of hours of *non-repeating* content [...]"
That's actually a good point! I think it only tells half the story though as even non-repeating content can get boring if the actual gameplay loop is repetitive or frustrating.
CandyCrush can have hundreds of non-repeating levels but you are still only playing connect three.
A personal thing is games on rails. I got the highly praised Red Dead Redemption 2 a while ago and while the Epic launcher says I played 24h, it feels like I have only scratched the surface and played an hour or two.
Yeah, there were sections where you could ride around but there were way more (especially story parts) where you had no choice. You would go somewhere and you get an out of bounds warning.
All the cool non-repeating content is whatever if I Alt-F4 and uninstall.
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That's actually a good point! I think it only tells half the story though as even non-repeating content can get boring if the actual gameplay loop is repetitive or frustrating.
CandyCrush can have hundreds of non-repeating levels but you are still only playing connect three.
A personal thing is games on rails. I got the highly praised Red Dead Redemption 2 a while ago and while the Epic launcher says I played 24h, it feels like I have only scratched the surface and played an hour or two.
Yeah, there were sections where you could ride around but there were way more (especially story parts) where you had no choice. You would go somewhere and you get an out of bounds warning.
All the cool non-repeating content is whatever if I Alt-F4 and uninstall.
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