Yesterday, I wrote in regards to the launch of Highguard, a brand new free-to-play live-service sport. The Steam participant depend was promising, even when the participant opinions had been lower than form. However now, only a day later, these gamers are already vanishing.
Highguard launched to only shy of 100,000 concurrent gamers on Steam, a really stong begin. Now, normally when monitoring stats on SteamDB you will note an ebb and a move as main markets sign off for the night time. However every day you’ll see a surge of gamers logging again on, and for those who’re very fortunate, it’ll be near the preliminary launch depend, or generally even greater!
Highguard, although, has not seen that standard sample happen. Within the 30-hours since launching – and due to this fact previous the purpose you’d anticipate to see gamers move again in as they get up or get house from work – Highguard has sat at round 18,000 concurrent gamers.
Performing some fast math, the participant depend has dropped by roughly 80%.
However primarily based on my analysis, a drop of this dimension isn’t unparalleled, and even unusual, although it’s nonetheless not a fantastic signal. The preliminary launch numbers put Highguard in an elite tier, as very, only a few video games ever hit the 100,000-concurrent participant mark. The prominence it bought at The Sport Awards and its free-to-play pricetag imply lots of people will hop on simply to see what’s occurring, so I’m not shocked to see a giant drop in numbers.
The true check will come throughout the subsequent few days. If the numbers can maintain at 10,000-20,000 it might have a future, as the builders have acknowledged they don’t really want a whole lot of gamers for Highguard to work. Let’s be trustworthy, 18,000 on PC alone is definitely good for a small crew’s model new IP. Plus, we don’t understand how properly it’s acting on console.
With all that mentioned, the large drop in gamers is much more worrying whenever you issue within the hundreds of destructive Steam opinions that may go away the sport branded for a very long time. There’s a small sliver of hope as right now’s stats present the constructive overview ratio climbing a bit, however it’s nonetheless 4,800 constructive opinions to six,000 destructive ones. It’s now sitting at 17,000 opinions complete, with a “Principally Detrimental” ranking.
Are all these opinions real? Is it affected by a basic case of Web gangbanging? In all probability at the least a bit of, certain, however a whole lot of them need to be real, too.
Who the hell knew getting the prime spot on The Sport Awards as a result of host Geoff Keighley would find yourself being a foul factor? Nonetheless, it’s doing infinitely higher than Harmony, in order that’s good.
