How to be successful long term:
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Make a good game
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Don’t ship your game with a rootkit
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Don’t ban entire regions from your game
If they drop they root kit I’ll play it
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Why would it sustain those numbers? It’s fine to play a cool game, be satisfied with it, and then move on.
I gotta say. Props to Lemmy users here. This thread is just post after post of generally reasonable take on how enjoyment and entertainment work in reality.
And really just a perfect argument for why infinite growth live service games are a fucking cancer dreamed up by humans who are fucking parasites.
Helldivers is great and the devs should be proud of their success. A+ .
Because in the minds of suits live service games are meant to be played forever.
Because it’s a live service game. The disconnect is that this doesn’t make players want to stay as much as the developer/publisher would like.
Yup I had fun with it, now it doesn’t sound as much fun anymore. I played it until it got boring due to repetitiveness.
They don’t have any kind of single player option which turns off a lot of players. It looked really cool, but as soon as I found out to really experience the game you have to play with others, became immediately uninterested.
Never touched it again after the psn fiasco. I am not deluded enough to think the devs were on the players side. If you saw there early messages about it and still think they are with you, you are completely lost.
And other major expansions for elden ring and FFXIV released recently. There’s potential overlap in the player base. 90% is a big dip though.
When the initial player base numbers are fucking unsustainable, this is a necessary and expected correction.
Panicked headline aside, there are still tens of thousands of players online at any given time and the game is doing extremely well at for not having had a proper expansion or new faction, and just the steady drip feed of new gear and equipment.
It’s clickbait more so than panicked headline but yeah I agree
And the Sony account requirement will be reimplemented in 3… 2… 1…
That’s like saying breaking bad has lost 99% of its viewers with no sign of recovery. L take
The point made in the article is that this isn’t supposed to some content that is released and over, like a TV episode. It’s a live service game that’s expected to be continuously played and generate income. This a huge drop is a mark against that model.
I do love helldivers, but I’m not exactly sad if live service games end up being not attractive to devs anymore.
Like every PvE game which does not have hundreds of people working to churn out content, its playerbase will dwindle until only those who do not get bored by its gameplay stick around. Whether it’s Left 4 Dead, Payday, Deep Rock Galactic or Vermintide, those types of games follow this pattern…
And I for one, see no fucking issue with that. It’s a great game, people play it until they have had their fill and then move on. Helldivers 2 is only an outlier because of how hard it hit at launch. It absolutely does not have the content pipeline to keep a large playerbase engaged, so yeah it will not keep printing a lot of money, just a little bit every now and then.
Now excuse me as I go and spread some managed democracy.
This message was approved by your local democracy officer.
Basically this. Anyone who is surprised by this has been paying literally zero attention to how these things usually go. The majority of the time when a game explodes that much, this happens. Sometimes to a lesser extent, sometimes to a greater one. A good chunk of the people who buy the game in the first place buy it to play with their friends, and when their friends move on to another game, they will too.
While you will have games that are the exception, such as PUBG which has had massive a player count for forever. they are indeed the exception.
Yeah, most players will play a game for a bit and then move on. It’s rare to get attached to a game and play it forever, and if you do, you likely only have one game like that. There’ll be people who play Helldivers 2 for years, but it doesn’t seem set up like an MMO so is unlikely to get the same long term traction.
Yeah but that’s the problem isn’t it? Why are more toxic games like the PvP centric ones some much more successful with sometimes even less content?
Chess has been played for ages with no dlc. Competition against another person is engaging on its own. And chess is a good deep game on its own.
Combine competition with a good game and you get a successful infinite live service game in theory.
Only one or the other and you get a flash in the pan.
Because PvP is basically infinite free content for people who like the game loop. I’ve had friends who love that sort of thing and they can play forever because they’re putting their skills against real people who aren’t just basic AIs.
They’re not. This same curve happens with PvP games. The ones that don’t follow this trend are the exception, not the rule.
That’s a good point. An online game can be successful while having a limited shelf life. Make your money and shut it down (or just ramp it down for the smaller audience if it’s worth the effort)
There Will be a bump when the release the new faction and the mystery 4th faction. But as someone with everything maxed out I just drop in twice or thrice a week now. Just nothing to aim for. Some kind of prestige system could be good.
As someone who loves Helldivers 2 but has not played in about a month and a half, it’s summer Forbes. People are also playing less games than normal.
It’s down 90% because of summer?? Come on now, that’s ridiculous. You think all the kids home for the summer refuse to play games?
Maybe you should take a look at the steam numbers for the other big games, they are absolutely not down 90%
Oh no, anyway.
I really enjoy the game, but now me and my friends are maxed out. Max samples, max medals, max upgrades. With nothing to progress to there is far less incentive to play.
The way my friend group works, and I imagine many others work, when I see one of my friends online playing a game, I join their game. And hell divers was great for that, they made joining games effortless. So it was very social.
But without any of my friends actually progressing towards something in the game, it’s far rarer for us to just join on each other cuz we’re not playing it alone. So now Helldivers is a an option, when we’re already together online, trying to figure out something to do, we will hell dive and have fun no problem. But it’s far less likely now
If they want to maintain a larger user base, they need to have something for people to constantly progress towards. It could just be donating samples to a new research project, that could be infinite grind
Its weird, but the game felt like it was going to be adding maps and combat zones with relative frequency. But I agree, the game got stale fairly quickly. It was fun, but not meaningfully more fun than Counterstrike or DOTA
I think they ended up slowing their release pace, which was sort of absurdly fast. Which I think is great? I’d rather see more meaningful, occasional updates. The kind that would bring folks back to play it until they complete said content.
They should create a third enemy that they ask the community to keep mostly hidden, only accessible to the best (progressed above a certain point) Helldiver. This is a bad, if fun, idea though.
So I guess what would everyone like to see?
And yet they need to also be fixing bugs en masse since they create tons of them every update.
The player base was always going to decline significantly.
It doesn’t have the same kind of slow grind and wide open maps with tonnes of things to interact with that kept up the populations of a game like WoW or Overwatch, so it was going to naturally decline anyway as most people got their fill of the game play and move on to the next game. Anything that is comparable either had a ton of content that was drip fed or has random loot boxes to keep people playing. This game lets you earn enough to play even the highest levels of play fairly quickly, with getting everything taking a bit longer.
The remaining population is actually pretty high for this kind of game, and it is far from dying. I play randoms when friends aren’t on even though I have unlocked all the upgrades to earn myself medals, but also to help out the other players because the game does promote team play even with all the accidental team kills. I never have to wait when there are more than 1,000 players on a planet, and the there are often several planets with several thousand even when people aren’t grouped up for major orders.
The community is engaged and while there will certainly be more of a decline as time passes, I wouldn’t be surprised if the game gets a significant bump in player activity (old players coming back) when they introduce the next faction. Probably not double whatever population is there when it hits, but maybe 50% increase as people come to check out the new content. I think the rapid release was their original plan to keep the player base going and I’m happy they slowed down to address bugs and do quality of life improvements for a bit.
This game also has the most friendly, or at least least antagonistic, player base I have ever experienced in an online game. Although most random games don’t have anyone speak up unless I do first, people help each other out, attempt to get everyone out, and there is often hugs on the ship after extraction. I have only had one player grief in dozens of random games and one match had someone who was rude. Far, far fewer negative experiences than any other game I’ve played.
It may get down to 3% of the highest number of players and will still be alive and kicking for those that do enjoy the game play.
Deep Rock Galactic would like a word about friendly player base!
Did I hear a “Rock and Stone”?
ROCK AND STONE TO THE BONE!
Rockity rock and stone!
Guild Wars 2 as well. :)
I haven’t experienced it, but hear good things about the community.
As would FFXIV.
Wait, was this heralded as some live service forever game?
I’ll play again at some point but for now, Iceborne.
The Elden Lord needs to kill some more dragons.
