Now player number graphs are not a mathematically simple line. There are peaks and valleys already over a 24-hour period, with the peak usually occurring at a time which corresponds to late afternoon / early evening in Europe, which simultaneously is morning in the USA. The valleys are when Europeans are already in bed, and the Asians haven't gotten up yet. And then there are seasonal effects, like Baldur's Gate 3 player numbers having gone up visibly in the holiday period after Christmas until early January. But if you remove those daily or seasonal fluctuations, the large majority of games ends up having a curve that reminds me (as a scientist) of a radioactive decay curve. Which is to say that we could, and should, be describing that curve by the time it takes to drop to half the value, the half-life.

And the reality of the half-life value of a typical game is sobering: For most games the half-life is less than a month. Hogwarts Legacy, the best-selling game of 2023, peaked at 527k players shortly after release, but was down to 204k a month later, 59k another month later, and 27k three months after release, which calculates to a half-life of about 3 weeks. Yay, another headline, 95% down in 3 months! But apart from a very small handful of "forever games" like Counter-Strike 2, a half-life time of about 3 weeks, leading to 95% down in 3 months is actually a pretty average value. It is a value that probably tells you more about the typical attention span of the typical modern gamer, rather than anything about the game.

Of course the amount of non-repetitive content affects half-life. Baldur's Gate 3 is doing relatively well because it has an unusually high amount of content. Palworld has a shorter half-life than most games because it is an early access game with a much smaller budget and thus content running out a lot faster, and some of its players at peak were probably just there for the hype. Starfield has a pretty normal 3 week half-time, because the "1,000 planets" are not actually non-repetitive content.

That brings us to another type of games: Live-service games. A game like Destiny 2 showed a relatively good half-life of about 5 to 6 weeks. But more importantly, it got back up to nearly the same number of players in February 2023 as it had on release in October 2019. Which of course corresponds to the release date of the Lightfall expansion. Not all expansions of Destiny 2 had this sort of success, and each expansion keeps player numbers up for only a month or two. And Lightfall has "mostly negative" ratings on Steam. But it shows the link between half-life and players running out of content that a re-injection of content can get the player numbers back up. These days it is extremely rare that a game grows beyond its initial peak, even when a good expansion or DLC is released.

Whether a live-service game is financially viable of course depends more on the absolute numbers than on the half-life of those numbers. Destiny 2 peaked at 316k players, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League peaked at 13k (and had a half-life of under a week). Are Rocksteady Studios / Warner Brothers going to make an expansion for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League if they can only hope to gain those 13k players back? As for Skull and Bones, we will probably never know, as the game isn't on Steam. But my guess is that initial player numbers will be disappointing for Ubisoft, and I didn't see anything in the beta which would suggest that the game would have a half-life longer than the typical 3 weeks.

I actually hope that live-service games are yesterday's hype, and the live-service games we get in 2024 are just the tail of that hype, caused by delays in development. I don't think that if you went to your investors today and told them that live-service games are a great money-maker, these investors would still be listening. The fundamental truth is that players only have a limited amount of disposable time every week. The opportunity cost of playing one game every day is all the other games that you then don't have time for. The MMORPG market showed that there is space in the market for only a handful of successful life-style games, and live-service looter-shooter games have exactly the same constraint.

Want to know a safe money-making bet in today's videogame market? It's a DLC for Baldur's Gate 3. Make it the size of one existing act, price it at $30, and it's a near guaranteed $300 million for 10 million sales. As you could make that DLC for less than $50 million while retaining the same quality as the original game, the return on investment is pretty spectacular. If your game studio is making a new game, it is a lot better to concentrate on making a game that is great on release, and decide on bringing out DLCs later. Designing a game as a live-service game carries a much bigger risk of the content getting diluted by the "forever" plans, and the game thus not being as successful on release, making the whole "forever" plan collapse. Count on losing half of your players in three weeks, and 95% in three months, because nearly everybody does. It doesn't matter, as the financial result depends more on how many copies you sold than on player retention. And in our highly connected social media world, if you release a good game, word will get around.