alpaca
King of Ungulates
- Joined
- Aug 3, 2006
- Messages
- 2,322
I thought it would be interesting to compare how many people play BE compared to Civ5. These days, Steam provides very accurate real-time info on this. A graphical comparison can be found here
As you can see, Civ5 has had a rather stable number of players in the last couple of months, with an average of 40k-50k players. BE, shortly after its release, was played by more than 80k people on average, but now has declined to only 15k-20k. A comparable graph of Civ5 shortly after the release also shows a significant decline, but much less pronounced than BE. Also for comparison, you can find a graph for Total War: Rome 2 shortly after release here, which is also significantly less strongly peaked than BE.
I'm pretty sure the people at 2K will be looking at similar graphs. Now, I guess everybody's waiting for a patch, but the post-release behaviour sure doesn't look like the game was well-received by most players. This agrees with my impression about the crowd in this forum, so we might be more representative than we sometimes seem to think.
Please don't use this thread as another venting location about your pet peeves, there are already plenty of those around. It's meant to be a meta-thread about how the game was apparently received and whether or not the reception on this forum might be representative.
Edit: As m15a correctly pointed out, the initial release peak is perhaps not as strongly suggestive as it looks, as BE was released on a week-end simultaneously across the globe, which makes the week-end peak and the release peak coincide. It should probably be imagined to be more like 65k players when assuming a 35% increase in player numbers due to the week-end effect. The player base also seems to have become more stable now, as can be seen on another website
Edit (Dec 23): It appears as if the patch did not have any immediate impact on player numbers. The holidays will probably see some increase due to the christmas sales, we shall see how the game does afterwards. It would be interesting to compare the player number to the sales number, but unfortunately, that information isn't really accessible. New graph
As you can see, Civ5 has had a rather stable number of players in the last couple of months, with an average of 40k-50k players. BE, shortly after its release, was played by more than 80k people on average, but now has declined to only 15k-20k. A comparable graph of Civ5 shortly after the release also shows a significant decline, but much less pronounced than BE. Also for comparison, you can find a graph for Total War: Rome 2 shortly after release here, which is also significantly less strongly peaked than BE.
I'm pretty sure the people at 2K will be looking at similar graphs. Now, I guess everybody's waiting for a patch, but the post-release behaviour sure doesn't look like the game was well-received by most players. This agrees with my impression about the crowd in this forum, so we might be more representative than we sometimes seem to think.
Please don't use this thread as another venting location about your pet peeves, there are already plenty of those around. It's meant to be a meta-thread about how the game was apparently received and whether or not the reception on this forum might be representative.
Edit: As m15a correctly pointed out, the initial release peak is perhaps not as strongly suggestive as it looks, as BE was released on a week-end simultaneously across the globe, which makes the week-end peak and the release peak coincide. It should probably be imagined to be more like 65k players when assuming a 35% increase in player numbers due to the week-end effect. The player base also seems to have become more stable now, as can be seen on another website
Edit (Dec 23): It appears as if the patch did not have any immediate impact on player numbers. The holidays will probably see some increase due to the christmas sales, we shall see how the game does afterwards. It would be interesting to compare the player number to the sales number, but unfortunately, that information isn't really accessible. New graph