FYI the game he’s talking about is The Anacrusis: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1120480/The_Anacrusis/
I get how that could be demoralizing for the team but I think the vast majority of users don’t look at steamdb or care about it. I think I’ve looked once or twice and only for bigger games.
This may sound dumb, and I’ll google it in a second, but idk what steamdb is.
Edit: ok, it’s a stats website or something? idk why this would be useful to the average player or the dev is upset. I don’t need to know how many people are playing XYZ game. Maybe I just play weird, indie stuff so that player count isn’t ever going to be a useful ranking metric, but why would a player care?
For competitive multiplayer games, there’s some minimum threshold of active players required for the experience to work. If there aren’t enough users, the chances that you’ll find a game with a reasonable skill gap and latency go way down.
Removed by mod
In my mind Early Access is for games that are so close to completion that they can ask for money and withstand criticism.
It should go:
- Alpha (closed or open)
- Beta (closed and/or open)
- Early Access
- Full Release
If your game suffers in Early Access then it likely means your game wasn’t ready for Early Access. Too often a game that should still be in Closed Alpha or Closed Beta is thrown up on Steam as Early Access. If you’re gonna do that then you have to take the criticism as well.
On the “dead game” thing: I have been noticing recently that much of the people who have said this or that is dead have literally only been concerned with the streaming popularity of said game. People are very much still playing, but nobody is interested in watching those people play it, so to anyone who is only interested in making money by streaming a popular game, it’s dead. Doesn’t matter if the game still has like 100,000 concurrent players at the time.
I’ve seen my fair share of people calling games like Legends of Runeterra dead because of streaming numbers despite being insanely popular. Some games just don’t lend well to streaming, and it’s stupid some people are using it as a metric.
Sorry, maybe it’s just me, but the gameplay video looks aggressively boring. Most of the reviews have quite low playtimes, too. I daresay the actual player count was closer to 1 than 10,000 by orders of magnitude.
I agree with closed beta, but for a different reason: I hate beta testing software. I don’t have time for that anymore. Maybe if I was in my 20’s or younger. I only want complete games, relatively bug free.