Do not make this game die

[DukeofRealms]

Yes, activity in the game and community (I only have stats for SMD, Steam, star-made.org traffic and purchases) is declining. There's no way to spin it differently, this is a fact. Last month our community stats (SMD) were slightly higher than the same time in the previous year. Additionally, game purchase stats in April were roughly the same as last years. We expect highs in November through to February and lows through March till July/August. This is what we've seen since 2014, 2015 and now 2016.

We have been and still are expecting further lows due to the recent bugfixing rounds and focus on initial user engagement. The addition of new game content has slowed down in the past few months to concentrate on other areas of the game. What we've planned (and now partly done) to improve initial user experience is:

• Implementing the Main Menu to get rid of the connection menu (a source of confusion).
• Released the new beta launcher to the public for testing; this comes with Java pre-packaged. Many of our negative reviews on Steam are due to Java installation problems, which are avoided with the new launcher.
• We're taking a look at the tutorial system; we know it's bad and we're aware of the negative impact in recent months it has had on newer players.
• We're also trying to figure out a way to better deal with Intel integrated graphics card users.

These four points all deal with the most frequent issues we've seen from support tickets and negative steam reviews.

We've already had our steam release almost two years ago and very few games have ever successfully pulled off a "relaunch"

This is, not completely true. Unfortunately, many people seem to believe this has been our Steam release and that's that, and use this as evidence that we shouldn't have realised on Steam at the time we did. We have not had a full release on Steam yet; we have released on their Early Access program. I can already hear the hundreds of voices now ...

"That is releasing on Steam duke... you're being picky with words." "What's the difference duke?"

Now hear me out, folks. The difference is quite significant and here's why. When a game is released on Early Access, it gets advertised on the front page just like any other game. When we released on the Steam Early Access program, we were the number one/two best EA title seller in the first week and continually ranked in the top 5 to 10 early access steam games for weeks. This was because we were on the front page of Steam, great exposure and great sales.

However, we haven't actually released on Steam yet. Full steam releases get greater exposure on the front page and subsequently more sales. Once StarMade is fully released, we will launch our full Steam release and in tandem, launch a full-on marketing campaign. StarMade will once again be on the front page and as a result, sales will dramatically increase for the following months.

Furthermore, we have another Steam tactic still up our sleeve. Steam provides games with a number of "Visibilty Rounds". These are to be used when we release a major update to our game, what happens is Steam puts the game on the front page of Steam for a minimum of X number of views. Further views are dependent on how well the game is selling. We have not used a single one of these in the past two years. We know we have issues with early user engagement and player retention, so we've been careful to save these advertising rounds for when we need them or are at a stage where we feel comfortable to start further marketing the game.

We're also preparing to broaden our market by translating the game and implementing support for non-standard characters. We have a huge foreign market we haven't even tapped into yet. Here are the following translation stats.

German - 98% translated, 29% approved
Spanish - 95% translated, 0% approved
Chinese Traditional - 93% translated, 0% approved
Polish - 92% translated, 92% approved
French - 92% translated, 69% approved
Rusian - 82% translated, 0% approved
Japanese - 74% translated, 0% approved

With Czech, Dutch, Swedish and Portuguese (Brazillian) being at 20 to 30% . Norwegian, Chinese Simplified, Estonian and Portuguese being below 10% translated.

StarMade is ambitious, especially for a new indie game company. Many man hours are required to achieve our goals, and time is money. The reality is, our largest number of sales up to the current date was the "Yogswarm". Back then, StarMade was selling for $3.00. One sale in the Yogswarm is approximately equivalent to a 1/3 of a sale from Steam today. Our major/primary source of funding is game purchases. If we hadn't have released on the Steam Early Access program (which was specifically created for games in our situation), then Schine would not exist today and the number of people working on the game would be a lot smaller. StarMade has been in development for a long time, for its scale and team size, this isn't abnormal or even surprising.

I know people like to hark back to the "good old days". So, let me clear the myths. From 2012 until June 2013, StarMade sales and its number of players were almost negligible. They were so low that a month's worth of sales back then doesn't even get close to a day's worth of sales now. June of 2013, the Yogswarm ensued and kickstarted the StarMade community. From July 2013 to March 2014, StarMade was rapidly decreasing in popularity and activity. Players that were retained from this peak, formed the solid core community we have today. April 2014, the new websites were released and community activity at minimum doubled. We continued to see community activity increase gradually after this, with large peaks from the Steam release and major content updates. Unless we're talking about either the Yogswarm peak or Steam release peak as the "good old days" (which were both short periods of time), we're doing better than before. Sales, despite being in a low at the moment, are still many magnitudes better than what we normally had in 2013, 2014 and similiar to what we had last year. We are starting to see a decrease in this May from last May, but we're not too concerned about this.

We know where we are and we have plans to market our game. 2016 has been a rough start for us, some internal changes have meant we're down on man hours. I'm confident we're making the steps to recover and build on from the success we've already had. Whether we're "dying" is up for you to decide, but we still have quite a few tricks in our box of secrets.

TL;DR: There is a decrease in sales and community activity at the moment, however decreases in this time of the year have always happened. Peaks always result in decreases and we still have a few tricks up our sleeve to get StarMade funded, marketed and developed.

 

[Comr4de]

We're also trying to figure out a way to better deal with Intel integrated graphics card users.

Ha, that was part of the motivation for me to build my current rig.

This is, not completely true. Unfortunately, many people seem to believe this has been our Steam release and that's that, and use this as evidence that we shouldn't have realised on Steam at the time we did. We have not had a full release on Steam yet; we have released on their Early Access program. I can already hear the hundreds of voices now ...

I probably should've specified early access, yeah. Full release is a ways off tho

TL;DR: There is a decrease in sales and community activity at the moment, however decreases in this time of the year have always happened. Peaks always result in decreases and we still have a few tricks up our sleeve to get StarMade funded, marketed and developed.

I wish you could give us more details regarding this but I have the sinking feeling that I'll have to settle for this. Regardless, thank you for the insight.

Unless we're talking about either the Yogswarm peak or Steam release peak as the "good old days" (which were both short periods of time), we're doing better than before.

Another clarification; when I say "good old days" (which I don't think I did in my post?) I'm talking about when Arstotzka was great and people trembled before the sound of our cruisers. (And they will tremble again)

 

[Ithirahad]

I see the recent developments in the game as building the framework for more robust and interesting systems.

Like the past... two years? It seems that every update they've been saying that they're building towards bigger things and better and faster releases... I understand that development can take a long time, but after a certain point you have to admit that you're not talking about "soon," but rather "eventually."

We as a community have been told the plans of where this game is headed and the features involved. The features have been implemented as they said they would, but a lot of them as you say are very rough

Strictly speaking, no. We'd been told that the next six months (From January, I think?) would be AI crew, fleets and formations, CHAIRS!, the new AI factions, fleets, and stations (which ARE in development ATM), and eventually fauna.

We're also preparing to broaden our market by translating the game and implementing support for non-standard characters.

Does this include entity names with characters other than A-Z/1-9/_-/Space? Because currently you can't even use apostrophes. :\

Anyway, Duke, I appreciate the info, in fact that was probably the best Schine post I've seen in a while. Localization and QoL updates are awesome - I just don't think it's what anyone was expecting.

As far as the "good old days," I suspect that there's a certain amount of bias because while the actual playerbase may not actually have reduced in size significantly, many of the popular veterans and big faction players have disappeared, stopped playing survival, or, in a few cases, even been banned. This is mostly the indirect result of the blueprint update, as far as I can see, and this issue should disappear within the next year and a half or so as the faction system is refined, more content is added, and the universe is improved.

(If you want to talk about something that's "badly timed," stop yelling about the Steam EAc release, and take a look at the blueprints update. The game still doesn't have the necessary features for that update to not be detrimental...)

 

[nightrune]

 

[DrTarDIS]

1: no there is no active pvp server today
2: as explained no you must go into fancy stuff just to get a starter ship
3 explain why there was TONS more people on the old meta? instant pvp?, you still had choice to buid btw

I agree. There needs to be a "beggar's fortune" starter ship you get for free.

Were there really tons? Or do you just remember something differently?
...

TL;DR: we as the community can improve new players' experience, assuming that we are losing players that fast.

yes their were, it got featured on steam's front page for a few weeks, and that put it in some blogger feeds. AFAICT it's run on that momentum for a while now. so it needs another "look at this" injection of PR/advertising.
I agree, WE gotta make "startup" a phase where you treat "free ships" like the throwaway toys they are. but...beta
...so "500n"(RE:500 nevers aka developper-planned-feature-time) "missions" that put you piloting some NPC faction's ship and doing a blockade run/action against another faction look like an answer.
could we as players "admin" our own versions of these? Sure, if not lazy. Me? I'm lazy. Most I'll do is spawn some small ships and tell the peasants to fight for my amusement.

Deny wont fix anything
the current gameplay is just not viable for many players, and you lose them,...

I agree, It's lost it's "arcade game" feel with a lot of the "polish", so it needs to try and get that back some way. Should pirates sometimes drop a ship-blueprint?

 

[Proxima_Centauri]

As someone who stopped playing a year ago and played for two and a half years straight before that, I'll try to lend some insight.

The fact is, the largest spike in interest in the game was due to the yogscast video several years ago, with a small amount of organic growth in 2015, and a steady decline since then.
The game is dying as of now.

One problem is that it is simply too difficult to get into this game for the casual builder, and it offers no content at all for the non-builder.
It takes tens of hours to get into the territory of having enough resources to build even a modest ship. Starting resources are just so scarce that even experienced players find it hard to build simple mining ships. For the new player it is simply too complicated to get into, and factions are just not substantial or established enough to give new players shelter while they learn the game (not to mention the trust issues)

The best way to fix this would be to build up non-building elements of the game. For example, have the player start off with a modest ship *edit* GIVEN a ship immediately upon spawning, and have a "first mission" be assigned which is simply to take out a pirate station using that ship (the pirate station would be randomly generated in an empty sector at the start of the mission so that it wouldn't be raided by other players first). The new player then does this mission and takes the station by killing the turrets. Now they have an empty station that they and their friends can use as a start of their base. (by the way, having salvage from stations be scrap only is one of the worst changes to the game ever IMO). Basically, throwing new players a relatively easy task that is also fun (salvaging is NOT fun) is a good way to get them hooked enough to learn the game a bit more.

Another thing that is lacking is that astronaut pvp combat is basically nonexistent. There is a "laser pistol" but it is just a static model that shoots the same laser sprite as the ship laser and makes no sound and has no recoil. Just giving the weapons the look and feel of actual weapons would help immensely with pvp non-ship combat. It doesn't have to be Halo, but when every other space game out there has this feature its absence becomes more prominent. (sound also NEEDS to happen, it would be a great improvement to this game)

One other change that frankly must happen is that weapons must be changed to work as a viable weapon with weapon blocks only. When a new player sees "cannon" they don't expect it to be a low fire rate high energy thing, they expect laser cannons from Star Wars. The weapons system is great for experienced players but it is a massive chore to learn.

The other problem is marketing. There is no visible marketing from this game. The only place where people learn about this game's existence are backwater forums and imageboards, often listed in a long list of discarded space games.
Starmade needs an image boost; some way of increasing the exposure of the game beyond occasional youtube vids on the official channel.
The best chance to increase player count is when the fauna update eventually happens. There needs to be a new "trailer" for the game that doesn't mention that the game is over 5 years old. Maybe an Aliens parody on board an abandoned ship?

*Edit*
I have to implore the Starmade dev team to look at some examples of very successful space games like Kerbal Space Program and their techniques of marketing, as well as how they have occasionally used tie-ins with REAL space agencies and companies like ESA and ULA to massively boost exposure. With space games like KSP, it is just so simple to get into compared to starmade today. I think most people who have played both games will agree.
The funny thing is, the ksp dev team is very mismanaged, non-transparent, and often times incompetent compared to the team here at Starmade, which makes me think that giving Starmade the boost in publicity it needs is well within the realm of possibility

 

[Alphajim]

I don't even read as soon as I saw "this game is dying".

This game is NOT dying, this is just the "easier" part of players who stop playing 'cause SM is now a game more difficult. Although, there are exams like the bac or the end of studies. The player base will grow on the next months.

You want an example of what means your argument (number of players) is wrong? Take a look at Ace of Spades classic (on buildandshoot.com) and see, there are always 100 players, and this version of the game is called "dead".

Now think about it and stop saying SM is dead. And please for all of the ones who say the same, DON'T EVEN compare Schine to a AAA team or a team with more ressources. This is just as stupid as comparing USA and Congo.

 

[Zyrr]

I don't even read as soon as I saw "this game is dying".

This game is NOT dying, this is just the "easier" part of players who stop playing 'cause SM is now a game more difficult. Although, there are exams like the bac or the end of studies. The player base will grow on the next months.

You want an example of what means your argument (number of players) is wrong? Take a look at Ace of Spades classic (on buildandshoot.com) and see, there are always 100 players, and this version of the game is called "dead".

Now think about it and stop saying SM is dead. And please for all of the ones who say the same, DON'T EVEN compare Schine to a AAA team or a team with more ressources. This is just as stupid as comparing USA and Congo.

Perhaps the single most fallaciously dense post I've ever read.

 

[Alphajim]

As you want.

I just hate defeatism (I don't know if I can say it in english) I seen in those "This game is dying" threads or posts.

What you don't understand is : we don't even care !
We play our game and it will be dead when NO ONE will play it.

 

[Erth Paradine]

As someone who stopped playing a year ago and played for two and a half years straight before that, I'll try to lend some insight.

As a lurker for years, and owner/admin of one of the most popular servers right now, much of what you're saying resonates very accurately with what we're hearing/seeing.

To start: our world tries to balance PVP, PVE, and build/design. Although IMHO the only way to pull something like this off, is to establish a player-run economy; otherwise solos develop, player-interaction tanks, and then we've lost a major motivator behind the "networked" aspect of the game.

The fact is, the largest spike in interest in the game was due to the yogscast video several years ago, with a small amount of organic growth in 2015, and a steady decline since then.
The game is dying as of now.

From our perspective, new player visits continues to climb steadily. So I'm not ready to say its dying. Player returns/retention on the other hand...well, that's another story.

One problem is that it is simply too difficult to get into this game for the casual builder, and it offers no content at all for the non-builder.
It takes tens of hours to get into the territory of having enough resources to build even a modest ship. Starting resources are just so scarce that even experienced players find it hard to build simple mining ships. For the new player it is simply too complicated to get into, and factions are just not substantial or established enough to give new players shelter while they learn the game (not to mention the trust issues)

Yes, yes, YES!! We wanted to originally focus on builds, while encouraging PVP/PVE, all as a means to encouraging mining type players as well. So we started with blueprint purchasing enabled, hoping that miners/builders could leverage the in-game market mechanics.

We were forced to disable blueprint purchasing within a few weeks due to griefers: essentially no effective game mechanics to mitigate (short of investing ungodly amounts of time into cleanups), "poor" collision detection/mitigation mechanics, and level of detail issues encountered with any larger entity (e.g. ship or planet).

The biggest thorn we're struggling with, is that servers are consistently and horribly unpredictable. Players are regularly on eggshells, wondering who's the next to lag everyone off. Will it be a too-large mining array, or maybe Yet Another fleet that goes awry. Perhaps someone will land on a planet today. Or maybe some noob flys into spawn's station...the list goes on, and it's getting downright stupid.

So...now we've turned on collision damage. Based upon what I've read, this mechanic seems to be lacking good physics functions as well. If it stops the server from crashing so often, well, we'll see how our population takes it.

As for newer players building anything interesting, that's where a lack of direction gets really frustrating: do we just throw money at the problem and give new arrivals 250Million credits...works great for a while. Or perhaps we make players "earn" that ship, except now they're just grinding, a function that Schine made clear was not desired.

Further, if players (especially newer arrivals) are afraid to interact, for fear of causing whole-server negative effects, then where is this going?

So, now we've setup a staging server, where those wishing to experiment on "questionable" designs can scurry off to; test their ship, and then run back over to the main world. This is tedious...its starting to sound like work, not fun.

Regarding crashes, before anyone points at underlying equipment: we're a hosting company, peering connectivity is multi-homed across multiple 1Gbps fiber links that rarely see more than 20% utilization, this particular server has 196GB of RAM, SSD-based storage (multipathed SAS drive array), bonded NIC connectivity, network latency is measured in sub-microseconds (to the first few hops out), and I've forgotten how many CPU cores... Hardware, bandwidth, and underlying equipment resources are most certainly not lacking one bit.

Behavior of the game server software itself, well, its ranking now as among the worst I've seen in years, "alpha" tagged code or not.

The best way to fix this would be to build up non-building elements of the game. For example, have the player start off with a modest ship *edit* GIVEN a ship immediately upon spawning, and have a "first mission" be assigned which is simply to take out a pirate station using that ship (the pirate station would be randomly generated in an empty sector at the start of the mission so that it wouldn't be raided by other players first). The new player then does this mission and takes the station by killing the turrets. Now they have an empty station that they and their friends can use as a start of their base. (by the way, having salvage from stations be scrap only is one of the worst changes to the game ever IMO). Basically, throwing new players a relatively easy task that is also fun (salvaging is NOT fun) is a good way to get them hooked enough to learn the game a bit more.

We're just now getting to a point where content, events, etc are being requested by an increasingly larger portion of our population. Right now, any sort of official or supported engineering in this sense is limited basically to admin commands, which don't come close to meeting needs of an admin. Next, we could perhaps reverse-engineer the game's SQL routines, or maybe figure out how to hook in some LUA scripts...but documentation is sorely lacking.

Yes, it's alpha code, I know...but there is a distinct sense for lack of direction. There are all these seemingly half-baked features, options, and functions, and many of these things are really neat...but players quickly hit a wall once they've gotten past the basics. Yay, you can paint a ship now, or make it larger, or faster, or kill pirates quicker...but where is this going?

Its clear that Schine lacks the ability to develop more intricate content, and let's be honest...why should they; players could easily exceed Schine's content development capabilities, if there was simply a mechanic for doing so. I'm not suggesting a complete rewrite either...how about just the "tutorial" system opened up to facilitate player-run/designed "missions": exploration, discovery, some combat, treasures, etc.

Another thing that is lacking is that astronaut pvp combat is basically nonexistent. There is a "laser pistol" but it is just a static model that shoots the same laser sprite as the ship laser and makes no sound and has no recoil. Just giving the weapons the look and feel of actual weapons would help immensely with pvp non-ship combat. It doesn't have to be Halo, but when every other space game out there has this feature its absence becomes more prominent. (sound also NEEDS to happen, it would be a great improvement to this game)

One other change that frankly must happen is that weapons must be changed to work as a viable weapon with weapon blocks only. When a new player sees "cannon" they don't expect it to be a low fire rate high energy thing, they expect laser cannons from Star Wars. The weapons system is great for experienced players but it is a massive chore to learn.

The other problem is marketing. There is no visible marketing from this game. The only place where people learn about this game's existence are backwater forums and imageboards, often listed in a long list of discarded space games.
Starmade needs an image boost; some way of increasing the exposure of the game beyond occasional youtube vids on the official channel.
The best chance to increase player count is when the fauna update eventually happens. There needs to be a new "trailer" for the game that doesn't mention that the game is over 5 years old. Maybe an Aliens parody on board an abandoned ship?

Combat really isn't my thing - but conflict and competition certainly drives an economy. It's a hook like that which keeps luring a wide variety of players in. Such a hook appeals to a broader audience, and provides a break from real-life that many often seek in-game. Give more players a reason to keep returning, and marketing becomes less and less of something that Schine needs to spearhead.

I don't think StarMade is dying, yet. There has been a clear focus on breadth of features/functions, even if things seem to move at glacial paces. What's frustrating for I'm sure many, is that depth is sorely lacking. Depth/content is always the more complicated topic anyways; why not focus on opening this up to the player population? Give them tools: documentation, an API, and some predictability/stability.

EDIT: one last point - having opened dozens of tickets in the bug reporting system, with nearly all of them validated/confirmed, I've had a first-hand opportunity to see that Schine staff are in-fact working hard. The thought of focus, or the feeling of a strong overall "direction", is what has me uncertain.

 

[chetyre]

So guys, after 3 years are you still in deny?
oh no let me guess, most of you left the game aswell! now there is about less than 4 servers active (with +5 players online)
I was right

 

[Aesthetics]

So guys, after 3 years are you still in deny?
oh no let me guess, most of you left the game aswell! now there is about less than 4 servers active (with +5 players online)
I was right

my BOY

 

[chetyre]

StarMade - Steam Charts

 

[Edymnion]

So guys, after 3 years are you still in deny?
oh no let me guess, most of you left the game aswell! now there is about less than 4 servers active (with +5 players online)
I was right

Funny, we're still here. The game is still receiving updates. And we're scheduled for beta and some ACTUAL ADVERTISING once that happens.

And I know for a fact that the server list does not represent the entirety of the game, because I'm actively playing on a server that isn't listed.

 

[Alphajim]

[Uninteresting trolling]

 

[chetyre]

Oh and well sadly we don't have stats pre-steam, but I remember well before that: +50 ACTIVE servers all across the world, many servers full, servers had so too much activity.
you could find players just by roaming on random planets (the good time without jump drives and +30 players per servers).
I m an old player, and I have played it again, this game clearly became too hard for new player, and the meta boring.
Time to recognize it and stop reeeing about how much this is alpha.
There is a reason why player left, a release wont magically make player come back, at most it will draw some attention.
People don't want 3 types of blocks for shield, 5 types of blocks for power, they don't want to know about farming, factory and stuff just to build or use a decent ship and go pvp. They don't want fancy power management.
But well thats only one thing on the list.
I was right about starmade losing players, and I m ready to bet: if starmade doesn't change the meta dramatically at a point they have to rework / remove most new features (such as jump drive, economy, factories, power etc), the release wont make starmade magically live again
[doublepost=1532013266,1532013232][/doublepost]

yea we know you don't care about the game dying

 

[Alphajim]

No, I just don't care about you saying the game is dying. Litterally everyone here noticed the playerbase being low. So I don't care about some random dude saying "Oh look I was right ! Raging uh ?".

 

[chetyre]

I have been warning this would happend for years, even before this post (which is now 3 year old).
But the only answer I got, is : "make your own game" "reee let us build"
At some point they even banned people critizing the game, and people had to make alt starmade forums (remember tomino sama stuff?)
This is quite ridiculous, this game got all it deserve

 

[kurosawa]

for me the update did nothing good.

- bubble shields
- forced block builds
- power beams

And so on, it's all been said before

 

[chetyre]

It was easy to know this game was about to die since the devs didn't care about the community at a point they were even banning it.