Starmade interest through the years

[Edymnion]

Now you are just backpeddling

You said the dwindling playerbase is "ENTIRELY" due to lack of advertising, my response was me saying to you "You are incorrect"

Allow me to provide the full quote you are taking out of context.

I honestly do believe the dwindling playerbase is due ENTIRELY to lack of advertising.

ALL games see people come in, play for a while, and leave. Thing is, new players only come in to replace the old ones when new people know it exists.

Literally the next line is where I specified that people leave, and we have no new people coming in to replace them, and the reason we have no new people is lack of advertising. Hence, the reason the player base is dwindling, as in "the explination that isn't so painfully obvious it doesn't bear mentioning" is the lack of advertising.

I'd hate to break it to you, the more then 200,000 people that have stopped playing this game are not lurking, they are not "waiting"

They have moved on.

The 200k people you're talking about were almost entirely Yogscast short attention span lookie-loos. We wouldn't have held them no matter what we did.

I seriously am concerned for this community if people honestly think that the 200,000 people who have left this game are just "lurking" and are "going to come back soon enough"

Again, no one thinks that. You keep saying we do, but we don't. We think they were a bunch of kids who saw something on a popular cast, came to look at it, then moved on. They were never a serious player base to begin with.

This has all happened in about 2 years, Loosing more then 90% of your playerbase within 2 years.... well....

Is to be entirely expected. 90% of players are casuals who are just breezing through.

Hell, I have multiple Steam games I bought and never played.

 

[Madman198237]

-snip-
Hell, I have multiple Steam games I bought and never played.

Ahhh! He's one of those CASUALS! Shoot him! Shoot him now!

 

[Ithirahad]

Um, to use the phrase that everyone seems to hate, its an early alpha. Its not supposed to be able to support a self perpetuating healthy player base at this point.

Its an alpha, its buggy and unfinished by definition. So its going to have a high turnover rate. That is to be expected.

Exactly. So, the "only" reason we have a small playerbase is not the lack of advertising. :P

Honestly, if they had been advertising, we'd probably have gone through all the potentially interested players by now and largely lost our chance to rebuild a community later.

 

[Edymnion]

Honestly, if they had been advertising, we'd probably have gone through all the potentially interested players by now and largely lost our chance to rebuild a community later.

This is very important.

Managing the hype train is CRITICAL.

Hype too late, and not enough people know about your product to give you a good launch. Hype too early and people get tired/bored of hearing about it and wander off to do something else before launch.

Hype has to be massaged JUST right in order to be effective.

 

[GDPR 302420]

The 200k people you're talking about were almost entirely Yogscast short attention span lookie-loos. We wouldn't have held them no matter what we did.

Yogscast did their "promotion" of this game in mid 2013, steam release was over a year later, December 2014.

According to you, Yogskiddies have a short attention spam, so this player count over a year later was, according to you not Yogskiddies.

Try again.

 

[Edymnion]

Yogscast did their "promotion" of this game in mid 2013, steam release was over a year later, December 2014.

According to you, Yogskiddies have a short attention spam, so this player count over a year later was, according to you not Yogskiddies.

Try again.

Lets look at the image again (granted, this is Google searches, but it was said the player numbers basically mirror it, so I'll use the handy image):

Biggest spike in interest was... in mid 2013.
The second spike after a long slowdown was... late 2014.

Aka, exactly what I said. And you'll notice that 75% of the numbers from the Yogscast interest was gone within a month.

So what part of this am I trying again? Because we very clearly see a sharp spike, followed by a sharp decline, then a pretty even decline in the game right up until it hit steam, then it petered off again at pretty much the same rate. The vaunted "200,000 players" is CLEARY an anomaly that in no way ever represented a true player base.
[doublepost=1506536900,1506536061][/doublepost]In fact, Red, lets take a closer look at the "there is no one camping out there waiting on updates" claim. I narrowed the Google Trends down to just the past year:


There was a fairly large surge in interest, relatively speaking, on the day the NPC update was made. And then a smaller bump after a lull when the new build tools were released.

So apparently, yes, there are people out there just waiting on new stuff, because there is at least a small rally in popularity whenever something new comes out or shortly thereafter.

 

[Scypio]

My interest waned initially because of the upcoming crew

Mmmmh... As i remember "Crew" are a completely optionnal feature, according to Schine themselves. Dumb way of looking things, as crew are the only way to force people building interiors but hey... They do what they want. I just gave up on the developement and i'll just sometimes build some vertical ships. Because reasons.
So don't expect crew to be added to the game soon.

And yes totally right, like Cru mentioned: It needs like one more year or longer until Starmade has enough features to say "hey lets raise new interest". After the power update, that might be released out of the dev-build branch in one month, will come the weapons update and lets say this takes another two months. Then the universe update including planets...Maybe another 3 months? Also some factory overhaul was once mentioned...1 month more? That are allready like 8 months. And then the factions should also get an update or some sort overhaul. So the word here is: patience. And either playing happily with the game as it is right now, or to just wait. When it comes to Starmade some guys need to learn to think in bigger and galactic terms like seasons and years, instead of weeks.

Man. You're far from what is needed and will be coming into the game. You're probably too enthusiastic about the developement time too and not counting the debugging time. You can double it easily in my opinion. Though Schine know well what they want for the future, it's just not entirely polished in details but they could actually give you a good idea of how much time is left before beta. But they will never tell, they don't want to make promises they can't keep.
I can just take the power update dev build as example.

 

[JumpSuit]

Lot of controversy in this thread, All points are valid from each party. The only thing going here is various aggravative notions to one another about the basis of the game. What is done, is done. The Devs still are going to produce content, the forums are still going to be the same by the way I see it so far. Although, we'll see.

 

[Dire Venom]

Having first hand experience with toxic community members is never pleasant :/
I used to think Leric was toxic (However he was still toxic in a contructive manner, and I respected his opinion despite his strong language). However insulting those who have a differing opinion to you, calling Starmade a suffering animal deserving being put out of it's misery and offering no constructive feedback beyond "***k you I am right you are wrong, I shall ignore everything that does not pander to my beliefs" is downright disgusting and paints a terrible image of our community.

Scheme is not perfect. They make mistakes. They are a small development team and try to listen to their community. They have devoted many years of their life, (a lot of it unpaid) to developing this game. How do you think they would feel to hear their community telling them to kill it and that they have always been wrong and have destroyed everything>>>??

Unless there is actual constructive feedback to be had, I would request a lock to this thread to bury this toxic mess.

 

[GDPR 302420]

So what part of this am I trying again? Because we very clearly see a sharp spike, followed by a sharp decline, then a pretty even decline in the game right up until it hit steam, then it petered off again at pretty much the same rate. The vaunted "200,000 players" is CLEARY an anomaly that in no way ever represented a true player base.

Yogscast started "promoting" StarMade on the 19th of June, 2013 they ended their "series" with theird 3rd episode on the 23rd of June, 2013.

If we are going by the narrative that you put forward that describes Yogskiddies as people with "short attention spans who would not stay here for long" then it seems clear that there was a sudden drop in intrest from after they ended their series up until the 20th of July. Then we had an increase in popularity up until around the 17th of August, then it went into a slow decline all the way into around the 22nd of November 2014.
After this, Steam release happened and there was a spike of popularity, then a slow decline up until mid 2015 and then it would become a more rapid decline.

With this is mind, it can be safely said that at the very least a sizable portion of the increase at the StarMade steam release was not from the Yogscast mob.

However, to bring attention to the last poitn you made that all those players somehow do not count because they "never represented the true player base" but heres the thing, they are a representation of the playerbase, it shows that this game dropped almost all players they have picked up after the steam release within a few months.

I would classify sweeping that data under the rug as "oh it doesnt count" is an outcropping of the very thing I am talking about when it comes to community stance on criticism and such.

In fact, Red, lets take a closer look at the "there is no one camping out there waiting on updates" claim. I narrowed the Google Trends down to just the past year:



There was a fairly large surge in interest, relatively speaking, on the day the NPC update was made. And then a smaller bump after a lull when the new build tools were released.

So apparently, yes, there are people out there just waiting on new stuff, because there is at least a small rally in popularity whenever something new comes out or shortly thereafter.

The data you have showed is not empirical evidence to say that "players are lurking and coming back"

Your data just shows a small increase after an update is released (which in the case of steam gets the game placed on the "recently updated" portion of the steam front page, which is more then likely where this slight influx is coming from) and for that increase of players to leave within a month or two after said update.

Also, the even with these "increases" the overall trend is still a downward trend.

Methinks your data has a little bit of confirmation bias bro.

However insulting those who have a differing opinion to you, calling Starmade a suffering animal deserving being put out of it's misery and offering no constructive feedback beyond "***k you I am right you are incorrect, I shall ignore everything that does not pander to my beliefs" is downright disgusting and paints a terrible image of our community.

I find this statement comical considering the same can be said about the other side of the previous debate.

 

[Tamren Shade]

Your opinion that you are getting your moneys worth is entirely subjective and not set in stone to anyone except for you and others who share your subjective views.

I've put as much effort into making my point as I'm going to, and despite our differences, we obviously like the same kinds of games.

What have you played that's given you better or comparable to $10/1500+ hours of game play? Or hell, even a more expensive game that's worth that kind of time investment. There's probably something there I'd like to check out.

Before Starmade the only game that every kept me around that long was City of Heroes.

 

[GDPR 302420]

What have you played that's given you better or comparable to $10/1500+ hours of game play? Or hell, even a more expensive game that's worth that kind of time investment. There's probably something there I'd like to check out.

Well to ansswer your question, here are some games I brought for around $10-15 that have given me more enjoyment then StarMade

• Empyrion Galactic Survival
• Starbound
• Stellaris
• Terraria
• Angels Fall First (shame this game is dead now :/)
  
• Arma 2
• The Culling
• From The Depths
• FTL: Faster Than Light
• Knights of Pen and Paper +1
  
• Life is Feudal: Your Own
• Mark of the Ninja
• Mirror's Edge
• Prison Architect
• Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion
• Squad
• Space Engineers
• SUPERHOT
• This War of Mine
• Total War: SHOGUN 2
• Tropico 5
• Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War

Note that some of this games may be a bit more to buy now, at the time of purchace they cost me about the same as StarMade when I purchaced it.

 

[Edymnion]

Before Starmade the only game that every kept me around that long was City of Heroes.

I beta tested City of Heroes and could not play it when it came out because I was sick of it. Same thing happened to Star Trek Online, I was early closed beta tester there too and burned myself out on it before it launched.

 

[Blakpik]

The analytics prove it. Starmade has been taken over by Australians.

 

[Edymnion]

Your data just shows a small increase after an update is released (which in the case of steam gets the game placed on the "recently updated" portion of the steam front page, which is more then likely where this slight influx is coming from) and for that increase of players to leave within a month or two after said update.

Okay, well that still supports "When there's advertising going on, we get new players". Which you are saying isn't a thing.

Either way, when the game updates there is at least a small spike of interest, even if its a small update. Which rather invalidates your "nobody cares, everything is horrible" bit, and reinforces "When we're ready to advertise, the people will come".

 

[jorgekorke]

Um, to use the phrase that everyone seems to hate, its an early alpha. Its not supposed to be able to support a self perpetuating healthy player base at this point.

Its an alpha, its buggy and unfinished by definition. So its going to have a high turnover rate. That is to be expected.

Six years, same old song and dance.

 

[Edymnion]

Six years, same old song and dance.

Six years, same answer because nothing has changed.

 

[Comradecolonel]

Salt levels are too high. Take some pills. I feel like the arguments went from the mechanics themselves to just whining about the entire game. Go do something else with your time if Starmade doesn't hold your interest any more.

 

[Calhoun]

Six years, same answer because nothing has changed.

And that is a good thing why exactly?

 

[GDPR 302420]

Go do something else with your time if Starmade doesn't hold your interest any more.

Again

Responses like this are part of the problem.

"Just leave" is the most non-productive and counter-intuitive thing you can say to concerns about the game. I've paid money for this game. I've spent enough time in this dying game that I could count it for an associates degree. If I have concerns about where this game that I'm interested in is going and I'm going to voice them.

Encouraging people to leave because they voice those concerns only makes the dwindling population problem worse and is one of the key reasons that this games population is not going to come back to life.

The very population you are claim is going to "return" when some major update comes out is not going to "return" for long if your attitude to criticism is "Just leave"

[doublepost=1506646123,1506645273][/doublepost]

Either way, when the game updates there is at least a small spike of interest, even if its a small update. Which rather invalidates your "nobody cares, everything is horrible" bit, and reinforces "When we're ready to advertise, the people will come".

You forgot to read the part where I said "that increase of players to leave within a month or two after said update"