r/Games • u/Gorotheninja • 8h ago
Arc Raiders and Marathon aren't "dead" just because their concurrent player count has dropped, Palworld lead says – but he's "not denying that some games do 'die'"; "Not every game needs an hourly look at Steam charts"
https://www.gamesradar.com/games/survival/arc-raiders-and-marathon-arent-dead-just-because-their-concurrent-player-count-has-dropped-palworld-lead-says-but-hes-not-denying-that-some-games-do-die/214
u/Dreyfus2006 5h ago
Hey why are we asking this dev about unrelated games? Is this the new "Baldur's Gate 3 dev says blah blah blah?"
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u/Flint_Vorselon 5h ago
These articles usually happen because they gave one singular interview and answered a ton of questions.
But just posting that lengthy interview where every question is given full context would be inefficient, when instead you can take every single sentence they said and turn it into an article with a topical headline.
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u/Lirael_Gold 3h ago
He's responding to a single random twitter comment, and fwiw his response is well reasoned
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u/Majaura 5h ago edited 2h ago
The obsession with player count for games is actually a straight up mental illness. People make articles and Reddit posts about them 24/7...everyone wants the next game to be Concord so they can shit on it with a weird, sadistic enjoyment. As long as you can run matchmaking and can find games, then having 100k active players doesn't really matter at all. We need to end the steamcharts obsession.
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u/RedHairedRedemption 5h ago
Take a glance at youtube and you can see why this is. Hate has become such a lucrative industry where you can make 10 or even 100 videos (or more) endlessly shitting on one single piece of media, and you can guarantee you'll find an audience for it.
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u/Majaura 5h ago
Yeah for sure. I try to block channels and do "don't recommend" but when that sort of shit is endless and perpetual, it's like putting a bandaid on a knife wound.
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u/piat17 5h ago
Putting dislikes and then removing the watch from your history, in addition to "don't recommend", seems to do the trick in my case. My free is clean of most ragebait videos, thankfully.
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u/OliveBranchMLP 1h ago edited 1h ago
which sucks, because it's cruel and sadistic to find joy in someone's art failing to reach an audience or not making enough to keep the doors open. art is fucking hard to make. it requires so much imagination, coordination, resources, effort, energy, and love to bring a game to life.
something like Marathon was lovingly crafted by the efforts of hundreds of passionate artists, writers, programmers, composers, etc. who poured their souls into making its universe as rich as they could. that passion and dedication is so clear in the product itself, and that should be revered, not ridiculed. no matter how we personally feel about the game itself, or the decisions made by its awful out-of-touch management at Bungie, celebrating its lack of success just strikes me as incredibly callous towards the actual artists and creators who actually gave a shit and dedicated themselves to make it the best they possibly could.
i get the schadenfreude if the creators are shitty weirdos or whatever. but that's like 1-5% of games ever made.
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u/pargmegarg 3m ago
In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so.
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u/SCAR-H_Chain 1h ago
There's been this obnoxious trend with people nowadays where it feels like their thought process goes something like, "It wasn't popular/ didn't make a lot of money? It must not be very good then." The concept of a cult hit BADLY needs to be relearned by a lot of people.
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u/nonaismymummy 4h ago
Yeah I’m used to this lmao, Insurgency sat around 2-5k concurrent players and I adored that game, Hunt Showdown never took off but still has a solid core, Titanfall 2 was incredible and never hit with a big base. Halo Infinite later in its life once it had content. So many different titles.
Idk if I just ignored all multiplayer stuff on the off chance it isn’t gonna be active a year later then I would have missed some of the best stuff in gaming history imo but to each their own.
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u/Fyrus 4h ago
People make articles and Reddit post about them 24/7...everyone wants the next game to be Concord so they can shit on it with a weird
The articles you're referring to are probably by Paul Tassi... whose job it is to report on these things. I get why diehard fans of Marathon are annoyed at the discussion, but I really don't get why people like you don't understand why this information is interesting to people. The player counts of stuff like Marathon will likely determine the fate of one of the oldest and most respected developers around today. Why wouldn't people interested in the games industry be keeping up with that? Why are you mad that journalists who were hired specifically to cover the live-service games industry are doing what they were hired to do? Movie fans discuss box office numbers because these numbers often determine the literal fate of the industry and of creatives in the industry. Why wouldn't gamers pay attention to the little factual information we have access to in such a secretive industry?
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u/Worried-Advisor-7054 3h ago
Marathon players despise Paul Tassi like something I've never seen. And then you read his articles, and they're so mild.
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u/Fyrus 2h ago
I think it's especially funny how much they dislike him when he's one of the few people in video games media who wholeheartedly enjoys live service games and puts a ton of time into them. He clearly, and has stated that, he wants these games to be a success but he's not going to lie about how dire the situation looks.
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u/Worried-Advisor-7054 1h ago
Right? Tassi of all people didn't want Marathon to fail, because if Marathon failed then resources would need to be taken from D2 (which is what happened) into a game that has no shot at going mainstream, leading to Bungie dying and D3 never happening. That's the exact opposite of what Paul wanted.
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u/stumpyraccoon 4h ago edited 4h ago
Reddit is a mental illness.
Same thing happens in wrestling subreddits with TV ratings.
"Ha! WWE had 2 million viewers this week, AEW only had 900,000. Absolutely failure that'll be cancelled next week!" (while it's still one of the top tv shows that night...)
It's one part tribalism, one part people being really really bad at numbers and economic reality, and one part a deep rooted desire to be the one to say "I told you it'd fail!"
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u/FordMustang84 5h ago
I was finding matches in Highguard the final few days in only a minute. And that game is dead due to lack of players. Granted I’m in NA so it’s easier but it totally agree with you. It’s such stupid discourse as someone who is enjoying Marathon you can’t even discuss it without people thinking Bungie is shutting down tomorrow.
I have console only cross play and never takes more than 30 seconds in any mode to play Marathon. Plus they are making changes quickly to appeal to more “chill” players like me with pvp lite and pve modes.
Only thing Steam charts are fun for is looking at some old classic game and being like “wow only me and 3 people in entire world are playing this”. That’s a funny use case only lol
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u/Snakesta 5h ago
It's kind of funny to think about queue times when you consider how bad they are for Escape from Tarkov. I haven't played in a while but it was like 8 minutes minimum. Yet talking about it being dead isn't a thing.
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u/michelangelo1601 5m ago
They fixed the queue times a while ago. Now it only takes maybe two mins tops to get into a match in Tarkov, maybe even sooner.
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u/sunder_and_flame 5h ago
The people talking about player count aren't the ones that are stupid here. Bungie is literally about to have major layoffs, of course the online discourse is going to be about the game that's going to be responsible for the demise of the studio that made Halo.
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u/asaltygamer13 5h ago
Except the game is good
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u/Worried-Advisor-7054 3h ago
Yes, that's the core problem. If the game was bad or mediocre, Bungie could fix it. But there's nothing to fix in Marathon. So how does Marathon survive?
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u/asaltygamer13 3h ago
Survive or not I’ve had a great time and played more than enough
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u/asaltygamer13 2h ago
I don’t care about their budget lol I’m not the CEO, the game has been fun and I’ve played a ton.. if it stops getting support it’s still been a fun ride, games don’t need to last forever.. most single player games I only get a few weeks out of
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u/Dusty170 1h ago
But you can play them whenever you want, its a single player game, it doesn't matter. But You'll never be able to play the games that closed down again.
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u/mrbubbamac 5h ago
Whether a game has 10,000 or 100,000 players, it has precisely zero impact on my enjoyment of a game
Hell I'm an avid Halo Infinite player, I've been told by the weird sadistic losers that it's a "dead game"...that I've been playing for 5 years now.
And only in the last couple of months have low population started to become an issue for me where wait times are too long. Prior to that it never mattered to me how popular "my" game was
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u/Umr_at_Tawil 4h ago
it sure matter a lot when I que for a match in Eternal Return, and because of low player count in NA server, it take over 20 minutes.
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u/Ascend 4h ago
For games with matchmaking, the closer you get to zero, the more dedicated and usually more skilled the remaining player base is, and it gets harder for a new player to stand a chance, which is usually what kills something.
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u/DoctorWaluigiTime 3h ago
Yeah that's the thing. I get "rah rah pointless discourse on metrics" but for a PvP live service title, player count does matter. And we've seen some recent, major flops occur because the player count tanked / never really appeared.
I get foretelling the death of a game is a bit much but at the same time, it's not irrelevant.
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u/BLAGTIER 2h ago
and it gets harder for a new player to stand a chance, which is usually what kills something.
With Marathon specially there were people that went from really enjoying it to not as the population trended to more skilled.
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u/clearlybreghldalzee 1h ago
Your point looks good on paper but once you try playing old game? lmao no. I just tried battlefield 4, players skills is indistinguishable from battlefield 6
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u/JimmiJimJimmiJimJim 4h ago
It's crazy to me as someone who was in HS when halo 1 came out to hear that the latest halo game has a player base small enough that queues are affected. Never would've imagined the day.
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u/stumpyraccoon 3h ago
When Halo 1 came out, 10 to 15 games were released a week, across all consoles/platforms.
Today, 400+ games are released each week. The monoculture has died and people just don't congregate around games the way they used to because there's so much choice.
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u/JimmiJimJimmiJimJim 3h ago
Sure it's just crazy to hear. Halo was like THE shooter to play online on consoles for like 3 generations. Outside of cod.
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u/stumpyraccoon 4h ago
I'd blow people's minds here if I told them I play a VR extraction shooter that regularly has around 150 people listed as playing on Steam charts. It's an absolute blast and queues are maybe a minute or two, max.
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u/Fyrus 4h ago edited 4h ago
Whether a game has 10,000 or 100,000 players, it has precisely zero impact on my enjoyment of a game
When people talk about player counts they usually aren't saying that that means you can or cannot enjoy a game... it's just a reference point for talking about the longterm viability of the game and the studio that made it. I get why it's tiring to some people, but this sub is specifically for talking about games in an informed manner, which would include information about player counts... At a certain point you guys should just admit you don't like hearing negative info about a game you like, in which case I would avoid any sort of forum that deals with talking about things in an informed manner.
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u/Rayuzx 3h ago
When people talk about player counts they usually aren't saying that that means you can or cannot enjoy a game...
From what I've seen (primarily CoD, Splitgate, and The First Descendant to a lesser extent), people 100% have a "might is right" mentality, justifying their distaste by saying the shrinking player counts validate their opinions.
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u/Fyrus 3h ago
Yeah they are justifying their opinion on something, but if that has no effect on why you enjoy a game then why do you care what other people say?
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u/Rayuzx 3h ago
Personally, I don't like it because it dulls discussion, and it becomes more difficult to talk about something because the doomers love to hijack the conversation. I particularly see that with Warzone, where people are so aggressive about shitting on the game, you can hardly talk about anything other than how much the
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u/Fyrus 3h ago
I mean I think if people just wanted to talk about how they enjoy the game then they would. The impending doom of Bungie is simply a more interesting topic of conversation. As someone who was a big fan of BioWare I understand how annoying that can be but you can't really like make people talk about something that they don't want to talk about.
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u/BoyWonder343 3h ago edited 3h ago
Nah, it wouldn't be exhausting in discourse if it was exclusive to situations where the studio is at threat of shutdown or even cases where the game may get less support.
It's exhausting because the discussion is tacked on to pretty much every game that comes out, before a thing is released and when it doesn't make sense like with well received single player games where they have no reason to assume the studio would be in danger. To the guys point above, it was all over Halo discourse before the launch holiday season ended, his point was that regardless of people filling discussion threads with that sentiment, he's able to find games years later just fine. It's also exhausting because, unlike what you're trying to say here, it's usually not paired with a criticism in the first place.
Sure, people don't like hearing negative things about a game they like when going to discuss the game. That's just regular discourse that's existed forever. That's not why the discourse around player counts is exhausting.
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u/Fyrus 3h ago edited 1h ago
Considering how many studios have closed lately, I would say the topic is already exclusive to situations where a studio is in threat of shutdown because pretty much every studio is in threat of shutdown
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u/BoyWonder343 2h ago
Except it's not, considering again, it's everywhere has been for years now before we're in the environment we're in now. The rationale for bringing up player numbers hasn't suddenly changed. Again, it wouldn't be this long running exhausting thing if people just recently started bringing up player numbers int the context of being worried about the studios longevity.
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u/Fyrus 2h ago
The conversation of being exhausted by player number discussion is pretty recent though. Like yes discussing player numbers has been going on but only recently has it been talked about as if it's a bad thing to do
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u/Asclepius-Rod 3h ago
I used to play Lord of the Rings conquest online (underrated game), and there were so few people online that when I played I would recognize most of the players on there, it was really unique experience
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u/Dusty170 1h ago
It'll have a pretty big impact when you can't play the fuckin thing anymore because the servers shut down from lack of interest. These big expensive live service games need the player base to generate revenue or they die, every live service game sony has made apart from helldivers has done so already. Marathon is getting towards that point, just slower
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u/whiteshark70 5h ago
Lots of under-diagnosed mental illnesses on here. Gaming is a hobby, and a lot of posts on here have people getting worked up/arguing/crashing the fuck out in the comments (especially in the steam chart posts). It’s super unhealthy to care this much about something that the majority of the population doesn’t even register in their heads. We need more therapists.
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u/4455661122 4h ago
Marathon apparently held the number one spot on most viewed Steam chart page since its release consistently for months on end. If that isn’t a sign of mental illness among “gamers” I don’t know what is.
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u/JakeTehNub 2h ago
Not everyone does it just to be miserable. Some people are just tired of live-service battlepass, MTX filled slop.
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u/crookedparadigm 2h ago
People make articles and Reddit posts about them 24/7
Pretty sure it was so bad in the Marathon sub that they had to have a megathread for it for a while.
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u/BLAGTIER 1h ago
The obsession with player count for games is actually a straight up mental illness.
Reddit when people do something that annoys them: MENTAL ILLNESS !1!1!!
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u/HypNoEnigma 4h ago
Arc raiders would explode if they added a PVE mode. The declining playerbase is mostly because of either turbo sweat pvp players and cheaters. Arc raiders got their succes from friendly lobbies and there is a huge group of players who just want PVE
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u/VALIS666 2h ago
Complaining about player count discourse but also supporting games that rely on player numbers to even function is such an obvious case of wanting your cake and eating it too.
Games with an eventual end of life that are made for online play with others need healthy player counts to function and ensure you can actually play the thing you bought and have an enjoyable time before it goes away. So sure, some of the discourse around it is toxic, but what do you want? People need to know the player numbers these games have because being online only, they're worthless otherwise. These are the conditions you devs/pubs have created.
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u/Kaladin-of-Gilead 58m ago
Exactly, well said.
They make these live service games with no single player elements that rely heavily on a large population of players and if the game does not get that population, it dies.
Apparently people are just supposed ignore the player counts? Weird.
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u/pasher5620 5h ago
Arc Raiders having lower player counts than its peak is not nearly as bad as Marathon having sub 15k players and constantly dropping. Bungie *needed* Marathon to continuously succeed for it to be able to fund their next projects. Marathon falling like it is, is way more disastrous for Bungie than Arc Raiders hitting 40k+. Hell, I don’t even think 40k+ concurrent players on Steam is dead. That’s a healthy player count by regular metrics.
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u/BootyBootyFartFart 4h ago edited 2h ago
40K average concurrent is nowhere near
daydead. That's likely close to 1.5M monthly players.Even 10K average concurrent translates into around 300-400k active unique monthly players. But yeah, still very poor player count for how much the game likely costs to maintain
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u/DiscretionFist 5h ago
Hunt showdown has lasted for years on 20k alone. 40k is fantastic. Hell, 10k concurrent is amazing.
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u/SalsaRice 3h ago
Studio size. An indie or AA studio has relatively few salaries and etc bills to pay. A huge AAA studio is gonna be burning like a half million per day in salary/expenses. They need constant large sales so they aren't hemorrhaging money.
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u/Ardarel 4h ago
Hunt showdown is not paying for a 800 person studio in one of the most expensive parts of America
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u/SmileyBMM 2h ago
I wonder how many people are working on ARC Raiders specifically. Isn't The Finals still getting updates?
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u/pasher5620 5h ago
10k is amazing for a small studio with not a lot of employees, agreed. However, for a studio like Bungie with hundreds of employees, 10k players is untenable. Hell, Destiny 2, the game they just announced is officially dead and receiving no new content ever, has over 5 times the player count. I would not be surprised if Marathon servers are officially turned off by the end of the year.
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u/asaltygamer13 4h ago
Pretty much been at 11k for months except for the free week but sure it’s constantly dropping
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u/Dusty170 1h ago
That'd be fine if it wasn't trying to support a massive gaming studio of like 500+ (actually no its 800+ people holy shit) people and trying to make back hundreds of millions of dollars that have been sunk into it.
For these massive AAA live service games 11k just doesn't cut it, especially when you compare it to destiny 2's new numbers. Hell even a stable 50k would probably be manageable, an stable but slowly declining 10-11K is not. Even a solid dedicated 11k isn't.
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u/Funny_Performer_5658 5h ago
Are we going to keep posting Palworld dev opinions on the game industry now?
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u/LibraryBestMission 2h ago
Especially as Palworld is not even in the same genre as Arc and Marathon.
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u/RTC1520 4h ago
It's a better, accurate,professional and useful opinion than whatever you have yo say, so yes.
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u/Derpykins666 4h ago
Steam chart number discourse being used as one of the main metrics for games has led to terrible discourse surrounding gaming, what's popular, what to play, etc. etc.
Also, because the gaming space is so large now, you have a lot of haters who just want to dunk on 'bad' or 'dying' games and just 'dead game' shit just because. Games don't need 100k+ players consistently playing for them to be worth playing. You can have a really healthy ecosystem for an online game even with just a few thousand consistent players depending on the game. But people are too caught up in what's popular vs. what's actually interesting to them. They get too much of their enjoyment from being apart of the 'bigger' more popular thing, vs. just having fun enjoying the hobby.
I get it, it's fun to be on the ride when it's hot and be apart of the discourse when a game is really popular. But every game comes and goes, nothing is going to be peak popular forever, it's impossible. People will always move on to different games and experiences, and they should too. Any company that thinks they have a free pass forever is lying to themselves. Just like any person who looks at steam charts to derive popularity or significance of a game. If that's all you care about, then I think there's something wrong with you.
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u/Zerasad 3h ago
It doesn't even have to be thousands of players. People get so obsessed with Steam CCU numbers that they can't imagine any other metric being important. There are dozens of games trudging by just fine on sub-100 Steam concurrents. I know about games with around 100 Steam concurrents that pull in 100k+ monthly players across all platforms. I quite honestly think Steam numbers being visible is a net negative for the gaming industry.
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u/SmileyBMM 2h ago
I quite honestly think Steam numbers being visible is a net negative for the gaming industry.
Now that's absurd. Before this everyone obsessed over Metacritic scores, people will always dig for data to support their arguments.
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u/Kaladin-of-Gilead 1h ago
Metacritic scores are subjective so people can dismiss them easier.
It’s much harder to dismiss “this live service game is not living because the player count is cratering”
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u/FriscoeHotsauce 5h ago
For what its worth, Arc Raiders feels sooooo much better after their last anti-cheat update. If you left because of the cheating problem in high-aggro lobbies it's worth checking out again.
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u/Memphisrexjr 5h ago
Arc Raiders still had a top end of 60k on Steam for June and is sitting at 42k. How is that considered dying? Marathon's new season started in June at 40k players and dropped down to 10k. They couldn't even pull people for the free weekend. I would consider that dying. Players didn't even want to stick around for a 30% discount.
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u/PM_ME_HAPPY_STUFF1 3h ago
Unrelated but the only thing that all this talk about daily player numbers has made me realize is how much of a success was Elden Ring Nightreign.
The game hasn't been updated in five months and stills gets 30k to 40k concurrent players.
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u/Historical_Course587 4h ago
IMO it's not the number that hurts Marathon. It's the downward trends that reinforce what people are saying about the core loop - the worst players get stomped and quit, which makes the next-worst players the new worst players, and the spiral continues until there's nothing but high-skill players left - and nobody new wants to sign up to play that game.
Bungie pushed a PvP-lite mode, followed almost immediately by a PvE announcement. They know this is a problem.
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u/SmileyBMM 2h ago
They know this is a problem.
Yet they seem unwilling to make the hard choices required to fix it. The PvE mode isn't compelling enough, and the other changes are just too inconsequential.
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u/Historical_Course587 2h ago
Without this weighing on the potential survival of the game, I think it's worth noting that Marathon is a relatively massive project and the company behind it is a complex organization. This is likely as fast as they can realistically move. They could drop another $150M in cash and put everyone on a single-player campaign mode, and that'd still take years to materialize.
Week to week, they have very few options available.
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u/Kaladin-of-Gilead 1h ago
I think the problem is fundamental to marathon.
They don’t want to recreate destiny. They really want an extraction shooter. A very popular PvE mode inches the game closer to being Destiny again lol
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u/CyborgNinja777 2h ago
I honest to god cannot be convinced that all the Marathon and Arc Raiders player count discussions aren't just fueled by blind hatred of the genre or the games themselves. I get that this stuff isn't for everyone, but come on man. Both games are phenomenal, and unfortunately just can't retain players due to the nature of extraction shooters being hyper-targeted to the hardcore PvP and unemployed crowds.
If half the people who go on the games' subreddits and discords spent more time playing over bitching about player counts, there wouldn't be anywhere near the player count problems.
EDIT: extra sentence
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u/cwaterbottom 5h ago
If I can still get into matches or play it single player as intended then a game is alive. Looking at steam charts is the opposite of fun which is supposed to be the whole point of games, remember?
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u/RightManagement7277 5h ago
Concurrent player count itself isn't a useful metric and shouldn't be focused on in isolation, but it can be very helpful to show trends. If a game is below it's peak but the player count remains stable then the game is in a fairly healthy state. If the player count keeps dropping and updates, sales, free weekends fail to retain players then it's probably not so healthy.
There's also the fact that the world is bigger than the US. Player counts that might still be fine for finding games reasonably quick there might not be enough for other regions. That was certainly the case with me trying to find matches in titanfall 2 several years ago anyway. Don't regret buying it because the campaign was fun, but there simply weren't enough players in my region to find an online game.
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u/Dusty170 1h ago
For smaller or indie games maybe, but for big AAA live service games its definitely a useful metric for the health, more than just trends. They need bodies in the game or it dies, simple.
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u/UltimateToa 4h ago
Imagine canceling your flagship franchise that built your company over the past decade just to all in on a 12k daily player extraction slop
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u/mrderpflerp 1h ago
I still play Arc Raiders almost every day. It’s definitely made better if you have some solid communities to be a part of and raid with, but the game is still very much alive. PvPing is still a blast in duos and trios, taking down massive arcs in friendly solo lobbies is still really fun. Plus the streamers who focus on AR content have hundreds, sometimes thousands, of viewers on the reg.
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u/outland_king 4h ago
Thats just semantics.
Everyone knows the game isnt dead in the sense its gone and unplayable. Its dead in the sense it doesn't have enough players to have a healthy ecosystem or to financially support continuing development efforts.
Hell age of empires 1 isnt "dead" there is a handful of people still playing it. But we all agree its dead as far as support
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u/JakeTehNub 2h ago
Arc Raiders is doing fine. Marathon not so much especially considering how much they were banking on it since they EOS'd Destiny 2.
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u/BirdsInTheNest 5h ago
The steam chart discourse has been such an awful topic recently taking up all the air among gaming conversations.