And it’s never been a secret that the developers were going to head in this direction if you read the Kickstarter goals with hindsight. The reactions should be more like, “Yeah but I didn’t think you were actually going to DO it!” instead of “WTF IS GOING ON?!!?”
I've made this point before: They have already found something that a ton of people liked. All that was needed was a little tweaking and extending of the current concept. They can do what ever they want of course, they can also run around naked and scream "Bazinga!!!" all day, but I'll put it like this: Big changes are seldom good with an established crowd.
If you have spent years on starting a burger place, and people have started coming regularly and bringing new customers, you have a popular concept - then after X years you decide from one day to another - no! Let's not serve burgers any more! We're now a fancy restaurant! What do you expect to happen?
First of all, you're probably not even good at making the food nealry as fancy as you're hoping from one day to another; secondly: you have to start from scratch attracting a new customer base. If your restaurant then sucks because you can't compete with the estabished market, you not only scared away your loyal customer base but you don't get new customers to stay either. The less people come, the less you can spread the good word. You can say all you want that you've had fancy food on your secret menu, if people come for the burgers, that secret menu isn't going to be other than a very risky switch once it goes live.
I've actually collected some data over the past two weeks and aim to continue doing so. I think this indicates that I'm not completely crazy in what I'm saying.
The following are the Steam statistics on how many people are playing 7DTD sice the 24th nov up until today:
Date Peak players Week day
24-nov 26572 sat about the 13th most popular game on steam
25-nov 27388 sun
26-nov 19746 mon
27-nov 19025 tue
28-nov 18504 wed 20th most popular
29-nov 18201 thu
30-nov 18880 fri
01-dec 21734 sat
02-dec 24273 sun
03-dec 17046 mon place 34
04-dec 16300 tue place 23
05-dec 15763 wed place 27
06-dec 15783 thu place 30
07-dec 15304 fri place 42
08-dec 19511 sat place 28
09-dec 20470 sun place 26
10-dec 14239 mon place 35
The following is a list of other popular games on Steam that are sort of in related genres and at what time they were in what spot in the game list:
On the 7th of dec:
Rust: 5
AKR: 8
Garry's mod: 17
Killing Floor 2: 21
Unturned: 27
Terraria: 28
7DTD: 42!
On the 10th of dec:
Rust: 9
ARK: 10
Garry's mod: 20
Terraria: 24
Killing Floor 2: 25
Unturned: 26
7DTD: 35!
7DTD according to TFP has sold 2.5 million electronic copies. Yesterday 0,56% of people who bought the game actually played it!
How many of those played 16.4? I have 3 to 1 people on my friendslist playing 16.4 compared to a17x, and a bunch who're not playing it at all even though they would if they weren't disappointed with the recent changes. However, that is not statistically relevant, it's impossible to know from my personal list how many people actually do play one version over another, but sure is that people are still playing 16.4, at the very least people who opt out of experimental builds.
The peak player numbers from my first spread sheet show a downward facing peak weekend player trend of an average of 13% the first week, increasing to an 18% drop of players the second weekend, losing a total of 7000 players over two weekends. The total number of weekday players is currently (today) under 15,000 per day, dropping by an average of a moderate 800-ish per day. If it were to continue exactly like that (which it won't because the curve will eventually balance out) it would take another 20 days and then nobody would play the game anymore.
The general trend of weekday players follows the same direction as that of the weekend players, just at a much lower amount of players.
Where it's going from here is hard to say because this isn't enough data yet. But it seems like it's pretty unlikely to be turning upwards if no drastic changes to the game happen. I dare predict that the game will probably plateau out in popularity, maybe losing another 5-8000 active players the next few weeks until the curve probably straightens out, staying popular with a select crowd and a small intake of new blood. Then at a new update the number of players will shoot up again of course. Where it goes from there, how fast it will go down or even up, all depends on what the game delivers. Sure is: down is never good for a buisness, you want straight or up. If you go down you need do seriously look out! In the gaming world, down is unavoidable (there are always new games that interest your player base), but your numbers should never dive bomb.
For sure right now the curve describes pretty much what people here are feeling. It would have been cool to actually have statistics from 16.4, but nobody thinks about insurance if they never had a problem in their lives. Then all of a sudden the fire strikes and you're pretty much f*.
This is only 2 weeks of statistics and if this was my business I'd feel the pressure. It's not like we're talking a loss of 7000 players coming from 300,000 players, but we're coming from 30,000! There is not really a margin of error here.
What the statistics also show: there are a lot of similar games that are more popular for what ever reason. They're doing something that TFP aren't doing. I'm glad this isn't my job because I'd feel the pressure right now. Let's hope there are some tricks up the guys' sleeves and that this isn't a surprise to them, because if it is, then they better get scrambling!
But we will probably find out in time (soonish) if this is something they counted on and were ready for, or if they were not, or if something completely different is going on behind the curtains.
With a deminishing fan base in early access, going to the numbers we see, there is a risk the game will never really sell well when coming out of early access. The only thing left then is good sales in EA. But if you lose a big chunk of your fan base then all you can do is start digging into your profits and savings in order to hopefully straighten things out in the long run. That's never the purpose of doing good buisness. What you want is to always stay on top, and fresh and keeping everybody interested.
What I would try to do in this case would be to first of all talk to the fans as a dev, the head of the team or company - let everybody know what the plan is so that the customers can calm down a little. Next (in the current situation) I would try to make both siddes happy, to give the a16.4-ers and a17-ers the best of both worlds by extending the game options and making what ever they want as core gameplay *optional*, thus breaking the negative trend, buying time. Then slowly try to build up the fans' and new customers' trust again by slowly implementing changes that build on the existing concept and leave the options in place. And NEVER take away something as part of your product chain if it is something popular, leave it in until the customers themselves chose to opt out of it, but NEVER take something away from them that they like! Because they'll make you pay for it, it's going to be your money, not theirs, paying the bills. This is now putting TFP in a dilemma because unless they create something that makes both camps happy they are bound to make one camp dissappointed in the future updates. That's not a smart business move when relying on 15,000 players that are quickly falling away.
I hope TPF don't rely on the voices on this forum to tell them how well things are going, because I'm sure that many people opposed to much of a17 have already left and don't care to speak up anymore. So all that's left is the typical fanboi and some more mature people who are trying to see things from a neutral to positive perspective. The positive people on here are hardly representative of the total number of players 7dtd has had. It's like killing off all your critics and only listening to the three people who are left and pretending those are all there ever were. You can chose to do that of course, but it's not going to change the facts of what's going on and you'll soon be done sawing through the branch you're sitting on.
I (rightly or wrongly) fault Unity 2018. My reasoning is the game Emypyrion rolled back from Unity 2018 to Unity 2017.
