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In the two weeks since my last post another 200 paying account have joined the game.

 

 

We are not talking hot numbers here. And these numbers are not going to be the savior of NQ. 

 

But people keep making accounts. Despite top comments of "is the game ready dead?" "So the game is scame?"  "Now that te game has flopped, will they drop subs?"  Heck scroll on down the first page on steam, and negative, negative, negative.  If I was  looking for a new game and knew nothing about the game and looked at those forums, I would walk away.  Yet in the last 2 weeks 200 people still said I will give it a try. Or even if they are alt accounts people said I enjoy this game so much I am going to throw more money at it. 

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26 minutes ago, RugesV said:

But people keep making accounts. 

 

Well, to be fair, no one seriously argued that people not doing them at all. Game on Steam, after all. And some old timers can never have enough alts.

 

Discussions usually go gloomy on pop bleeding from bad retention. Like how many (in meanwhile) quit in this 2 weeks or decided to play less, etc. Because its about balance. 

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17 hours ago, RugesV said:

In the two weeks since my last post another 200 paying account have joined the game.

 

 

Where are these stats even coming from? Also, "another 200 paying accounts have joined the game" means very little for a subscription MMORPG.

 

What matters is churn rate -- obviously if the game is gaining 200 new players every month but 300 players cancel their sub, that's not growth.

 

There's no such thing as a subscription that "maintains" its user count -- it doesn't exist. Subs must constantly gain new users every single month just to "maintain" their user count because churn is a fact of life. 

 

In my view, a dead game is much like a dead language. It being "dead" has little to do with how many people speak it.

 

Plenty of people speak Latin. It's "dead" as a language because it's no longer evolving and changing. 

 

I view DU in a similar way. It has enough subs for NQ to keep the lights on, but DU hasn't had any real substantive evolution for a long time now (since even before release). Nor is it realistic to expect that this will magically change as NQ's devs focus on other projects. 

 

And as @RugesV has said, 200 accounts is not material, regardless...but especially so in the wider context of churn.

 

A game can certainly get new accounts every week and still be dead commercially and dead in terms of development. 

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The only number that counts (for both players and NQ) is how many people that continue to play the game for more than the first subscription period.

And we are now on the 3rd. (4th?) wave of NQ making both new and old players give up and quit the game.

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5 hours ago, blundertwink said:

 

Where are these stats even coming from?

I said that in my first post, thanks for following along.  Occupied territory count. 

 

5 hours ago, blundertwink said:

because it's no longer evolving and changing. 

 

Good news then DU is evolving and changing.  1.1 and 1.2 came out in a decent amount of time. Looks like 1.3 is coming out tomorrow?   And they are working on implementing PVE content which is a pretty big evolution.

 

Doomsayers.  You look at games like PUBG. People screaming that game died years ago.  Yet it is currently the 6th most played game on steam with 500,000 players at one time in the last 24 hours.  Even  an old sub game like Everquest. People have cried out so many time that the game died. Yet a quarter century later and the game still has a strong playerbase. Has major expansions every year. 

 

 

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4 hours ago, RugesV said:

Doomsayers.  You look at games like PUBG. People screaming that game died years ago.  Yet it is currently the 6th most played game on steam with 500,000 players at one time in the last 24 hours.  Even  an old sub game like Everquest. People have cried out so many time that the game died. Yet a quarter century later and the game still has a strong playerbase. Has major expansions every year. 

 

 

Would be news to me that these games were considered dead (Especially since one was originally a mod, became a b2p product and is now f2p). The only game that had always been called dead was WoW. Strangely enough, it lives on.

 

But yes, I think the comparison is flawed at the latest when you compare a 6 year old f2p battle royale game with 500,000 players for 3 years and a freshly released monthly subscription massively multiplayer online role-playing game that has no growing numbers on Steam and is more like a bigger Minecraft or Space Engineers server.

 

Correlation does not imply causation. Especially not if you want to compare different games from different genres with a different target group. Conversely, you would then claim that PUBG is more MMO than DU because of the numbers. :D

 

 

https://steamdb.info/charts/?compare=578080,2000270

 

image.thumb.png.4fc1f1051a087eca6c52ec0dbb426670.png

 

 

Edit: I've added some stuff.

 

So how do we tell when a server is dead? Quite simply. Player activity. Let's take a genre comparison of WoW example with the European fresh server Giantstalker in Wrath of the Lichking.

 

Point 1:
Players usually raid. These numbers can be measured with raidlogs. Even if we don't know how many people play on the server, we at least know how many characters raid. This helps to get an overview of what is happening on the server. So, how does the server look like?

 

https://ironforge.pro/population/classic/Giantstalker/

 

image.thumb.png.a7dbdc66b87f33a01171dde8ad3576d3.png

 

 

What happened here that out of 3000 characters only 233 are still raiding? Exactly a few days before the data collection for end of January, Blizzard offered free transfers to Nethergarde Keep. Mind you, it was forbidden to transfer to Giantstalker for economic reasons. Now Blizzard created the situation that you can transfer away but not to Giantstalker.

 

Point 2: 

Even if we don't know the numbers of players, at rush hours on the server in the capital of the Lichking expansion you can hardly see players on my faction who have the maximum level. Likewise, the auction house indicator is good to see how many end-game items are in it. 

 

I'll leave the link to the transfer server. People can form their own opinion about what happened here.

https://ironforge.pro/population/classic/NethergardeKeep/

 

image.thumb.png.9152382de14eb13734a7b459c24edd00.png

Edited by SirJohn85
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10 hours ago, SirJohn85 said:

So how do we tell when a server is dead? Quite simply. Player activity.

 

Its little bit trickier. Depends on who you ask.

 

If you ask players who expected something even remotely on level of EVE, player-driven galactic opera so to say -- at this threshold game as dead as your egyptian mummy. 

 

If you ask someone who are mostly for "Landmark in Space" and comfortably enjoying their stuff on level of large Minecraft server (as you mentioned above) -- game for them is totally alive. And they are right, inside their framework.

 

This why we have sometimes arguments and lots of passive-hostility in these talks. Because people speaking pretty much about different planes of existence.

 

 

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49 minutes ago, le_souriceau said:

Its little bit trickier. Depends on who you ask.

 

Of course. I absolutely agree with you. Every game attracts its playerbase. There is a reason why all the big orgs since 2016 have collapsed in DU and moved on. Because the pillars of the game have not convinced. You can also just ask around who plays DU with friends. Or why that person no longer does today. 

 

Today, the game will attract other players. Whether the "Landmark in Space" player will be enough to pay money on a monthly basis I don't know. The moment you consider the removal of planetary mining as an evolvement, I just question that it has done the game any good. It was also put right that 200 tiles does not automatically mean 200 new players, but accounts. Who the owner of these accounts is can now be speculated. But it doesn't seem to be the Steam players, as they show a downward trend.

 

But to find a conclusion here: My point, however, still stands. The raids in WoW are, among other things, a criterion for how you measure it. What would be the equivalent in DU? I would say the marketplace and its offerings. If you can't find (high tier) things, then in my eyes you have too few players to cover the economy. 

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19 hours ago, RugesV said:

Good news then DU is evolving and changing.  1.1 and 1.2 came out in a decent amount of time. Looks like 1.3 is coming out tomorrow?   And they are working on implementing PVE content which is a pretty big evolution.

 

I don't really agree, that they've had updates isn't the same thing as developing the game. What real features were added in 1.1 and 1.2? It's 5+ months after release now...clearly it isn't enough. Why would anyone think that 1.3 is going to be a big feature...?

 

We're talking about one single PvE mission when having PvE content over 5 months after release for an MMO is not exactly something to celebrate when the expectations from every other product in this genre is that this is standard.

 

I don't view NQ's slow and minor updates as real development...but I'll agree that's entirely subjective and it's up to players to decide if their new skins and one new mission is enough to grow the game. I don't see it. 

 

19 hours ago, RugesV said:

Doomsayers.  You look at games like PUBG. People screaming that game died years ago.  Yet it is currently the 6th most played game on steam with 500,000 players at one time in the last 24 hours.  Even  an old sub game like Everquest. People have cried out so many time that the game died. Yet a quarter century later and the game still has a strong playerbase. Has major expansions every year. 

 

Except that DU hasn't had more than 1,000 concurrent players on Steam ever...its active player count has cratered since release down to barely over 100 people a day!

 

There's an ocean of difference between DU and a game like PUBG or EQ. Those games have had some level of scale in their life, DU hasn't. Even NQ's CEO describes DU as a "moonshot". 

 

There's a huge, huge difference between "doomsaying" -- declaring something without any evidence -- and DU, where there's no objective evidence to indicate actual player growth. 

 

Occupied territory count is a far worse metric than Steam stats because of what I've already explained -- the only metrics tell you anything for a subscription product are churn rate and number of subs. Steam stats are the closest thing to churn rate we can see because it measures DAUs -- territory counts do not. A few hundred new players every few weeks is really, really bad even if you assume a conservative churn rate based on known metrics. That's not growth. 

 

We're talking about a game that as I'm writing this has 19 people playing it on Steam. That's what death looks like. 

 

There's more people playing 2015's "Corgi Warlock" on Steam than DU, an MMO that's not been out a year. That's not a growing, alive game. 

Edited by blundertwink
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NQ had no problem showing and bragging about how many player they had during early pre-test and alpha when the numbers where decent.

But when players started leaving because NQ.. they stopped showing the player count and never bragged or even just mention any player numbers ever again..

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8 hours ago, blundertwink said:

We're talking about a game that as I'm writing this has 19 people playing it on Steam. That's what death looks like. 

And thats what I call the servers being down for maintenance. 

 

I found it so laughable, that with so many things wrong with NQ.  And the numbers being so bad as they are. That you have to spout bad numbers to try and prove your point.  I mean heck why not take it a bit further and post the numbers from when steam does its weekly tuesday restarts. OMG 0 people where playing the game today. 

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On 2/19/2023 at 9:27 PM, RugesV said:

In the two weeks since my last post another 200 paying account have joined the game.

 

 

We are not talking hot numbers here. And these numbers are not going to be the savior of NQ. 

 

But people keep making accounts. Despite top comments of "is the game ready dead?" "So the game is scame?"  "Now that te game has flopped, will they drop subs?"  Heck scroll on down the first page on steam, and negative, negative, negative.  If I was  looking for a new game and knew nothing about the game and looked at those forums, I would walk away.  Yet in the last 2 weeks 200 people still said I will give it a try. Or even if they are alt accounts people said I enjoy this game so much I am going to throw more money at it. 

Or perhaps someone signed up 200 more alts to farm missions?

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Its simple, between 50 and 125, even a simple phone gane has more and thus these numbers are just not sustainable. Add the too little too late mentality and the listening to a select few and  its bad weather.

Still there are games released around the same time with a space building scope that did alot worse.

 

Still hope DU reaches potential but till then, its silent when the wind doesnt blow

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14 hours ago, RugesV said:

with so many things wrong with NQ.  And the numbers being so bad as they are. That you have to spout bad numbers to try and prove your point.

 

Fair enough, I didn't realize this was during maintenance. My mistake! 

 

That said, it isn't like the numbers are better today. If it's only 19 during maintenance and only about 60 otherwise...that's not substantively different. The fact is that DU's DAUs have fallen consistently since release. 

 

Apparently we agree that their numbers are bad and that the game is not growing, so I'm not sure what your point is in decrying "doomsayers" that declare that the game is dead.

 

There's no evidence that the game is alive or growing...certainly a few hundred new player claims between several weeks is not. In my opinion, 1 PvE mission 5 months after release is not nearly enough growth in terms of actual feature depth. 

 

If the idea is that DU can bounce back and stick around for years and years even with mere hundreds of players or will magically explode its player count....well, that's just not a perspective that I understand and to me doesn't align with NQ's 8-year history of slow development and improvised design. There's no way in my mind that NQ's trickle of slow and small updates will bring this game around. 

 

I just don't understand the idea that the game might rebound "somehow" or even more baffling...the idea that it actually has a growing player base and is fine because Steam doesn't matter.

 

I genuinely appreciate the optimism of those that believe the game still has a future, but I personally can't see how the math will ever work to make this game a viable product commercially. When even 20,000 subs seems like a hopeless moonshot, it's safe to say it's dead as a subscription product.

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5 hours ago, blundertwink said:

 

Fair enough, I didn't realize this was during maintenance. My mistake! 

 

That said, it isn't like the numbers are better today. If it's only 19 during maintenance and only about 60 otherwise...that's not substantively different. The fact is that DU's DAUs have fallen consistently since release. 

 

Apparently we agree that their numbers are bad and that the game is not growing, so I'm not sure what your point is in decrying "doomsayers" that declare that the game is dead.

 

There's no evidence that the game is alive or growing...certainly a few hundred new player claims between several weeks is not. In my opinion, 1 PvE mission 5 months after release is not nearly enough growth in terms of actual feature depth. 

 

If the idea is that DU can bounce back and stick around for years and years even with mere hundreds of players or will magically explode its player count....well, that's just not a perspective that I understand and to me doesn't align with NQ's 8-year history of slow development and improvised design. There's no way in my mind that NQ's trickle of slow and small updates will bring this game around. 

 

I just don't understand the idea that the game might rebound "somehow" or even more baffling...the idea that it actually has a growing player base and is fine because Steam doesn't matter.

 

I genuinely appreciate the optimism of those that believe the game still has a future, but I personally can't see how the math will ever work to make this game a viable product commercially. When even 20,000 subs seems like a hopeless moonshot, it's safe to say it's dead as a subscription product.

I notice you added 'as a subscription product' on the end of that statement as though there were any viable alternatives to it being one.  What would you do instead.  As I see it the alternatives are:
 - make it a one-off payment.  In this case the initial investment is significantly *higher*, probably 4+ months of sub.  How does that make it more likely to attract new players?  Seems to me this is mainly of interest to the players who stopped playing and as you said those aren't enough.

 - make it f2p with a cash shop or whatever.  Seems like a cash shop would struggle for the same reason the game struggles, lack of content.  I mean, if they can't afford to make enough content to keep things interesting for subscribers, how would they afford it with less money.  They'd sell a few things up front sure, but what do I keep coming back and buying?  DAC?  Isn't that like a sub?

 

And even if you could do something other than a sub, things like mining units, missions, etc would be even more broken if you could run an ever-increasing number of characters by adding a new one every few months which you could then keep forever.  And right now some of those things are primary content for a lot of players.

 

I don't know if anyone thinks there is a growing player base here, or even disputes the decline.  It's just that some of us think it could get better because it's not dead yet.  Personally I can see a change in the pace of development and a genuine attempt to turn things around and I'm hoping that they come up with a winning formula soon.  It's a shame we're here after so many chances to get it right but it is still possible for the game to do a No Man's Sky IMO.  They just have to use their limited resources effectively and come up with some genuinely engaging gameplay.

 

 

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26 minutes ago, Zeddrick said:

I notice you added 'as a subscription product' on the end of that statement as though there were any viable alternatives to it being one.  What would you do instead

 

I add this because subscription products are just really hard to pull off, especially today with such a glut of subscription products across verticals other than gaming. 

 

You're right that they have shit options at this point....but there's a reason why MMOs that fail to achieve enough scale invariably go FTP! MMOs of any model can't work without enough scale, but FTP can change the dynamics by removing the barrier to entry.

 

Obviously a lot more people would try DU if it was free or even if it had a one-time purchase price. Hate it if you want (I tend to hate it), but FTP is the last resort for MMOs because it often works

 

You're right that it wouldn't work for DU, because most MMOs are already engineered to tap into time-tested engagement loops that addict people, if only for a month or two. Plenty of time to hit them with an in app purchase, which they usually ship with just in case the sub fails.

 

For better and worse, DU wanted to be different -- it doesn't have these same engagement hooks (and one PvE mission won't fix that). Plus, it was designed at its core to be a sub game -- you're right that the mechanics break down as a FTP game without radical changes (for a whole mess of reasons). 

 

This is why I tend to think the game is dead, because they don't have good options to make money with their product...and didn't even plan for the eventuality that they might not be able to scale their subscription base. It's a "bold" strategy from a monetization perspective, especially for a modern MMO. 

 

45 minutes ago, Zeddrick said:

It's just that some of us think it could get better because it's not dead yet.

 

I do respect that perspective. I wish I had optimism in my black heart. Stranger things have happened than DU coming back with a vengeance and kicking ass into the top of the charts. Anything is possible.

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14 hours ago, blundertwink said:

Stranger things have happened than DU coming back with a vengeance and kicking ass into the top of the charts. Anything is possible.

 

At this point i like 95% sure, DU kept alive only to be "frankensteined" in some way or form into plan B with metaverse/3d blog/some other nonsense. So it will become something between demo and stepping stone for this new project. Also to save some initial, hardcore landmarkish population as bonus for new thing too.

 

Most likely it was course since JC removal -- venture cap bought it out to recycle into something else, that will, actually, provide some ROI.

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frankly, I'm amazed the game is still online at all despite the double figure player count. no idea how they are still supporting their AWS contract.

guess they are riding out the 1year in advance paid up players...

 

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6 hours ago, le_souriceau said:

 

At this point i like 95% sure, DU kept alive only to be "frankensteined" in some way or form into plan B with metaverse/3d blog/some other nonsense. So it will become something between demo and stepping stone for this new project. Also to save some initial, hardcore landmarkish population as bonus for new thing too.

 

Most likely it was course since JC removal -- venture cap bought it out to recycle into something else, that will, actually, provide some ROI.

 

Well...NQ has already showcased player creations as a pitch for their "3d blogging" product, so this isn't a big conspiracy or a stretch. The reality is that NQ owns everything players make; I wouldn't be shocked if they utilize this for whatever plans they have in the works. 

 

IMO, The VCs always owned NQ...they put in more than $15 million just between Andurance, Azom, and a few individuals. Maybe Andurance had to buy out Azom or some individuals, but the mathematics suggests that this has been the case for a very long time now. 

 

Andurance seems fairly big on the metaverse/web3 concept, too...so appointing Abboud was no coincidence and their belief that this direction will somehow conjure ROI is hilarious to me. Yes, by all means...take your failed MMO tech to the metaverse. Seems to fit like a glove. 

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3 hours ago, blundertwink said:

 

... so this isn't a big conspiracy or a stretch.

 

Yeah, I meant that its not new info (obviously), just wanted to emphasize, that DU future is now not about actually DU, but how it can be integrated in something else. 

 

4 hours ago, blundertwink said:

Yes, by all means...take your failed MMO tech to the metaverse. Seems to fit like a glove. 

 

I think what they can do realisticly (beyond all metablablabla) -- is to create some sort system from DU tech, allowing people to run their own servers or kinda rooms, boosted with access to dev tools of building terrain and other stuff, ability to add new assets of all sorts, etc. Likely even monetize content (with commision).

 

So, overall, it can end up like Second Life on ultra-steroids.

 

Tricky question tho is the same -- how to balance costs.

 

 

 

 

 

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If people are thinking like I am after all the issues people had after linking their accounts with steam. Then I suspect that the non steam player count will certainly be higher than the steam count as I am waiting for my DAC's to finish before making my decision about weather to link my DU account to steam or not.

 

As for DU status, I think it can still succeed but it all depends on the content players make and the additions NQ add to the game.

 

Also to respond to what useful features have been added. The schematic box is sooo GOOD I love it! and I have not got a large factory yet but even with a small one it makes things loads easier.

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On 2/26/2023 at 5:35 PM, ADCOne said:

The schematic box is sooo GOOD I love it! and I have not got a large factory yet but even with a small one it makes things loads easier.

 

Well the option to scrap schematics was a better and simpler one. When flying over the planets a last time the amount of actual stuff there is not just low it has never been so low.

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