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Jozzie McTowel

Degression of total playerbase (Ark & Atlas)

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56 minutes ago, zubov56 said:

There is a massively huge difference between stocks and gaming charts.That is why there is a commission over seeing everything stocks because there is a lot of illegal activity there and manipulating stocks and stock values.I would garner a bet that the illegality of the stock market is far worse than the commission can keep up with or prove and that is a problem,they need to definitively prove every wrong doing.

A game chart is VERY simple,it doesn't even carry any discrimination or excuses ,it shows that on that platform weather it is succeeding or players are disapproving with the developers ideals.

Both charts are historical data about past performance. A disclaimer that must by law be prominently displayed on every securities prospectus: "Past performance is not an indication or guarantee of future returns." This is the legal codification of what I was alluding to about Buffet's views, namely that whether the chart is about gaming or any kind of security, trying to use data about the past to predict the future has never proven remotely reliable. Tell me you think Wildshot™ irretrievably effed up their launch and it seems doubtful they can ever recover from the negative press, reviews and word of mouth. Tell me you think tone deafness to their playerbase is turning people off in droves and the cognitive dissonance between their vision for the game and what players actually want is leading them down a path that won't end well. Hell, tell me you really honestly think that some vast number of people will quit and never play again over stone nerfs and the age debuff  (I am skeptical of this notion, but not skeptical over the idea they will !@#%$ to high heaven about it). 

I am perfectly willing to agree that available information suggests strongly they are off to a poor start. But don't try to tell me a chart can tell anything conclusive about a game's future, because the simple plain truth is it can't.  Do not confuse simplicity for accuracy or usefulness. Changes next week or next month or six months from now could cause that chart to look very different. I would be saying the same thing btw if the chart was through the roof and everyone was proclaiming Atlas the game to dethrone WOW.

Past performance is not indicative of future results. A chart can tell you a trend. It cannot tell you why that trend is happening, for how long it will continue, or what may cause it to change.

Edited by boomervoncannon
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3 hours ago, Jozzie McTowel said:

I'll give u comparison from those games in the top so much on Steam, excluded TF2 cuz of space issues and it being a free game. Now the games in this list are listed on all time graph.

comparison.thumb.jpg.319202d95d2c75e049683eba448c3dd6.jpg

tldr;

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Looks like this one has the fanboys all riled up.

The people trying to imply these graphs mean nothing are embarrassingly in denial.

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2 hours ago, zubov56 said:

A game chart is VERY simple,it doesn't even carry any discrimination or excuses ,it shows that on that platform weather it is succeeding or players are disapproving with the developers ideals.

No, it doesn't.  Weather conditions affect game charts. The day of the week, the hour of the day, whether a major city is dealing with a blackout, a war... I can give you a thousand things that can affect a game chart and not one of them have anything to do with the devs or even the playerbase for that matter.  It could lose players simply because the company stops an advertising campaign. Games gain and lose players all the time and there is no one single metric you can point to and say... AH HAH! That's why. EVERYONE left because of THAT!

Does the trend show that this game is losing players? Yes. Is it because of the dev's, we don't know and there's no way to prove it. A lot of people, myself included, buy a game, play it for a while and decide, "naaa... I'm going back to my old game."  And that may be exactly what's happening here. You don't know and neither does the OP.

Furthermore, the charts in the op are not comparing apples to apples.  It's trying to explain how badly this game is failing by comparing it to a long established game and that is not an accurate comparison.  My chart however, compares the launch of NMS to Atlas and that IS a fair comparison.

21 minutes ago, Adfax said:

Looks like this one has the fanboys all riled up.

The people trying to imply these graphs mean nothing are embarrassingly in denial.

Looks like this one has all the doomsayers riled up. They're pulling statistics out of their ass and trying to match them to their own warped opinions.

*waves his dead chicken in the air and yells, "OOOGA BOOGA"*

Edited by Jean Lafitte
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Id like to chip in is that most of the other games are more of a pick up and play and forget... with atlas its like pick up, play,  and lose everything.   To create high stress game is just gonna drive people away.   
 

We dont play game to be stress out... in fact we play game to relieve stress. 

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6 hours ago, Jean Lafitte said:

No, it doesn't.  Weather conditions affect game charts. The day of the week, the hour of the day, whether a major city is dealing with a blackout, a war... I can give you a thousand things that can affect a game chart and not one of them have anything to do with the devs or even the playerbase for that matter.  It could lose players simply because the company stops an advertising campaign. Games gain and lose players all the time and there is no one single metric you can point to and say... AH HAH! That's why. EVERYONE left because of THAT!

Does the trend show that this game is losing players? Yes. Is it because of the dev's, we don't know and there's no way to prove it. A lot of people, myself included, buy a game, play it for a while and decide, "naaa... I'm going back to my old game."  And that may be exactly what's happening here. You don't know and neither does the OP.

Furthermore, the charts in the op are not comparing apples to apples.  It's trying to explain how badly this game is failing by comparing it to a long established game and that is not an accurate comparison.  My chart however, compares the launch of NMS to Atlas and that IS a fair comparison.

Looks like this one has all the doomsayers riled up. They're pulling statistics out of their ass and trying to match them to their own warped opinions.

*waves his dead chicken in the air and yells, "OOOGA BOOGA"*

The reasoning u are taking here is that there would be a huge amount of players in case a blackout or weather would affect the amount of players, in this game it's not the case, here it's each and every new cuckup by the devs that makes more players leave the game. Even with the most recent patches as if from today they are not really addressing the major complaints people are discussing in here. You think I'm just cherrypicking with these charts, go look at them right now, it's Saturday, we had nearly above 20k players this night and right now there are about 6-7k players online thanks to their last patch that came out hours ago. So stop calling us doomsayers, look at the charts, u say it isn't fair to compare it to long established games? Make your own comparison then and use EA games or what not, I mainly wanted to compare Ark & Atlas but someone said: Hey Ark is in the top steam charts so it can't be that bad right? Just look at the damn graphs, other games improve over time and make a steady flow of players who keep returning. In Ark they fucked up with their latest expansion and with Atlas they fucked up since the start, how else do u explain that a game loses nearly 80% of it's playerbase in the time of a month? Considering we had nearly 60k players at peak times and now in a weekend where in most places in the world except Australia it's terrible weather we get 6-20k players online, it's a fail and it will stay a fail, they are not addressing the right concerns of the players, they are not listening to us either. They pretend that they are listening to us now with some promises but I will assure you those promises won't be kept cuz they are gonna ruin the game even further before they even address our concerns.

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1 hour ago, Jozzie McTowel said:

The reasoning u are taking here is that there would be a huge amount of players in case a blackout or weather would affect the amount of players, in this game it's not the case, here it's each and every new cuckup by the devs that makes more players leave the game. Even with the most recent patches as if from today they are not really addressing the major complaints people are discussing in here. You think I'm just cherrypicking with these charts, go look at them right now, it's Saturday, we had nearly above 20k players this night and right now there are about 6-7k players online thanks to their last patch that came out hours ago. So stop calling us doomsayers, look at the charts, u say it isn't fair to compare it to long established games? Make your own comparison then and use EA games or what not, I mainly wanted to compare Ark & Atlas but someone said: Hey Ark is in the top steam charts so it can't be that bad right? Just look at the damn graphs, other games improve over time and make a steady flow of players who keep returning. In Ark they fucked up with their latest expansion and with Atlas they fucked up since the start, how else do u explain that a game loses nearly 80% of it's playerbase in the time of a month? Considering we had nearly 60k players at peak times and now in a weekend where in most places in the world except Australia it's terrible weather we get 6-20k players online, it's a fail and it will stay a fail, they are not addressing the right concerns of the players, they are not listening to us either. They pretend that they are listening to us now with some promises but I will assure you those promises won't be kept cuz they are gonna ruin the game even further before they even address our concerns.

Right. ARK is in the steam charts but ARK had a very bad EA period aswell. Almost identical to the one we're having right now. I'm not a crybaby getting out charts to somehow try to make a point that isn't really a point but thinks it's a point? Or something like that. If you want to go ahead with charts saying the playerbase loses people, be my guest. But it is pretty much only pointing out the obvious. But then again; Everyone needs something to bitch about. 

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1 hour ago, Jozzie McTowel said:

The reasoning u are taking here is that there would be a huge amount of players in case a blackout or weather would affect the amount of players, in this game it's not the case, here it's each and every new cuckup by the devs that makes more players leave the game. Even with the most recent patches as if from today they are not really addressing the major complaints people are discussing in here. You think I'm just cherrypicking with these charts, go look at them right now, it's Saturday, we had nearly above 20k players this night and right now there are about 6-7k players online thanks to their last patch that came out hours ago. So stop calling us doomsayers, look at the charts, u say it isn't fair to compare it to long established games? Make your own comparison then and use EA games or what not, I mainly wanted to compare Ark & Atlas but someone said: Hey Ark is in the top steam charts so it can't be that bad right? Just look at the damn graphs, other games improve over time and make a steady flow of players who keep returning. In Ark they fucked up with their latest expansion and with Atlas they fucked up since the start, how else do u explain that a game loses nearly 80% of it's playerbase in the time of a month? Considering we had nearly 60k players at peak times and now in a weekend where in most places in the world except Australia it's terrible weather we get 6-20k players online, it's a fail and it will stay a fail, they are not addressing the right concerns of the players, they are not listening to us either. They pretend that they are listening to us now with some promises but I will assure you those promises won't be kept cuz they are gonna ruin the game even further before they even address our concerns.

Show me the poll that says, "I quit playing Atlas because..."

I have seen them do nothing but cater to whining.  They have addressed issues with aggressive mobs. They have addressed issues with alphas.  They have addressed issues with griefing...  Wait, why the hell am I repeating this.  You obviously don't read.

Instead of whining about how difficult this game is, people are now whining about how easy it is.  Have you seen that?  There is obviously no way in hell they can appease everyone who wants to play this game.  Everyone has their own idea of what this game should be and if this game isn't changed to meet their exact expectations, they're going to quit. Ok, bye.  They addressed the issues that made it unplayable for me.  They're banning griefers and hackers. I've seen the list. They've fixed aggressive mobs and alphas so that I can walk out of my house.  I can play the game.  

If you read the interviews with the co-founders before this game was even launched you'll see that they already had a vision of what they wanted Atlas to be.  As long as this game isn't so unplayable that I can't walk out of my house without getting slaughtered, I'm willing to sit back and see what that vision is, be it dragons, ships or submarines.

Pulling up charts and statistics and trying to prove that this game is failing because the dev's aren't listening is both laughable and near-sighted.

 

Edited by Jean Lafitte
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Just now, Jean Lafitte said:

Show me the poll that says, "I quit playing Atlas because..."

I have seen them do nothing but cater to whining.  They have addressed issues with aggressive mobs. They have addressed issues with alphas.  They have addressed issues with griefing...  Wait, why the hell am I repeating this.  You obviously don't read.

Instead of whining about how difficult this game is, people are now whining about how easy it is.  Have you seen that?  There is obviously no way in hell they can appease everyone who wants to play this game.  Everyone has their own idea of what this game should be and if this game isn't changed to meet their exact expectations, they're going to quit. Ok, bye.  They addressed the issues that made it unplayable for me.  They're banning griefers and hackers. I've seen the list. They've fixed aggressive mobs and alphas so that I can walk out of my house.  I can play the game.  If you read the interviews with the co-founders before this game was even launched you'll see that they already had a vision of what they wanted Atlas to be.  As long as this game isn't so unplayable that I can't walk out of my house without getting slaughtered, I'm willing to sit back and see what that vision is, be it dragons, ships or submarines.

Pulling up charts and statistics and trying to prove that this game is failing because the dev's aren't listening is both laughable and near-sighted.

 

And that's where the split is between small groups and large groups. I'm in a large group, but I only play with 6 other people in that group. We don't want this game to be easy just like ARK was. ARK was and is, extremely easy. We finally have a game where it can be hard to achieve certain goals, and all I've seen in the last month is the game made easier for the sake of small groups. Don't get me wrong, we're fine with it. But come on.. The devs also need to stay put if it comes to their original ideas for the game. The animal nerf was necessarily, but within no time there were many PvE builders here that cried the shit out of it, making the patch go in reverse. Now everyone is complaining the animals are way too OP, also in raids. 

 

With Atlas, just like with ARK - Everything will never be good. 

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Right currently Atlas isn't even in the top 50 of most played Steam games with even a Wallpaper engine app being more popular in terms of "players" than an one month + old game that was overhyped and overpromised, 40k players on a world, u can even split up the nearly 12k players on a Saturday over 4 official servers and unofficial, no wonder the game get's easier, nobody is playing more land is available alot of real players left the game as it is. Ark lost players to Atlas which in return totally quit Ark & Atlas all together if u compare the charts. Even Ark's EA phase was far better than Atlas in terms of players that kept playing it, even now it's out of EA it's even performing poorer than the EA times, if Atlas goes the same way in terms of players when reaching final development stage u'll all be cruising around on empty grids with a ping of 75 cuz that's just how it is right now.

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9 minutes ago, Jozzie McTowel said:

Right currently Atlas isn't even in the top 50 of most played Steam games 

Incorrect. But I'm not going to bother to post the stats that prove that statement wrong because you're obviously only interested in whatever stats you can dig up that prove your point.  Wait... do you have an actual point?  Do you have an actual bitch about this game or are you just going to stand on the street corner with your cardboard sign screaming, "THE END IS COMING"?

Edited by Jean Lafitte
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Current copy paste of the stats

ATLAS
11,977
playing an hour ago
21,748
24-hour peak
58,788
all-time peak

 

Now don't try to tell me unofficial isn't counted cuz this just counts whoever has the Atlas app running in their Steam client, and as far as I know Atlas is only available on Steam and u need to run it through Steam to connect to an unnoficial server as well.

Here is the Steam stats from their in Steam stats page, it gives them a couple thousand extra players but still it's a horrible statistic.

 

Top games by current player count
CURRENT PLAYERS PEAK TODAY   GAME
 
905,373 905,373   Dota 2
798,066 810,424   PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS
626,017 628,750   Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
124,649 124,735   Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege
82,888 83,083   Grand Theft Auto V
74,613 74,613   Warframe
64,191 64,191   Football Manager 2019
62,597 62,597   MONSTER HUNTER: WORLD
60,113 60,113   Team Fortress 2
54,189 54,189   Rust
46,824 46,824   ARK: Survival Evolved
42,370 42,370   Garry's Mod
41,773 58,723   Rocket League
36,890 36,890   Dead by Daylight
35,938 35,938   Sid Meier's Civilization VI
34,251 34,251   RESIDENT EVIL 2 / BIOHAZARD RE:2
34,230 34,600   Ring of Elysium
32,028 32,028   Sid Meier's Civilization V
30,178 30,178   Terraria
30,168 30,230   Euro Truck Simulator 2
29,665 29,756   Unturned
28,703 275,043   KHOLAT
27,597 28,353   Path of Exile
22,940 22,940   Hearts of Iron IV
21,186 21,860   Paladins
21,039 24,139   Arma 3
20,874 20,874   Total War: WARHAMMER II
18,645 18,655   War Thunder
18,182 18,182   Europa Universalis IV
17,972 20,012   Counter-Strike
17,721 17,781   NBA 2K19
17,535 17,535   The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
16,335 16,335   Fallout 4
16,151 16,151   Stardew Valley
16,081 17,802   中国式家长/Chinese Parents
16,001 16,001   Football Manager 2018
15,756 15,756   RimWorld
15,572 18,963   World of Tanks Blitz
15,307 16,211   The Elder Scrolls Online
15,115 15,115   The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition
14,969 21,850   ATLAS
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actually i had a bug where steam thought i had uninstalled ATLAS and had to start it directly from the exe. didn't even need steam running.

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I suggest u read up on this and tell me on how many of these points u see do these devs fail, and don't just blame it on EA or the fact that this is still EA and they might be doing as the article suggests, they are doing it completely wrong. Keep in mind they should have plenty of experience of how they fucked up Ark in EA the last 4 years or so and then they even have the guts to throw such a shitshow of code at us with their own stubborn design choices and inability to use their eyes and brains at the same time to comprehend what this community was asking for when it was necessary. They might be fixing some stuff players have been asking for but in half ass way and far too late while still pumping out new features while core mechanics are still broken as fuck. Read it before u reply, yes it is a medium long read but it sure sums up how not to do it, and if u reflect how Atlas is being developed after u read it u will start to understand how bad it really is.
 
 
039c7e04a15ae25fbe9da13ff92bfac1?s=140&d

Nathan Lovato

Nathan is a game design expert at GameAnalytics. Currently founder and game design instructor at GDquest.

 

 

Players leave games. According to Marc Robinson’s 2013 GDC talk, “On average, less than 40% of players return to a free-to-play game after just one session.”

On average, less than 40% of players return to a free-to-play game after just one session! Click To Tweet

And as you know, our first duty as professional game designers is to create compelling experiences. We make games for the players to enjoy and play! If they leave our games too fast and too often, we have failed.

Thinking of the reasons why players are leaving your game is a great opportunity to put yourself in their shoes. Not only that, your financial success largely depends on the size and fidelity of your audience. In particular if you are monetizing your game with in-app purchases.

The data science team here at GameAnalytics recently unveiled the results of their latest study. The report shows that a strong player retention is correlated with your game’s financial success. In particular keeping your very first players entertained. This means that it is critical to retain users if you want to make a living off of your work.

There are but a few reasons why players are leaving your game. The 2 most important ones are frustration and boredom: the archenemies of flow. If you don’t know what flow is already, it is a mental state characterized by the feeling of energized focus and a complete absorption in a given activity. That is a state of deep enjoyment, if not passion. That is the state we want our players to fall into with our games! Regardless of the genre we going for.

This is, once again, our first duty as game designers – approached from the angle of positive psychology. A good player retention boils down to a design that calls for flow; a fluid and deeply rewarding experience. And please do not mistake that for a casual and grinding-based game! Your game’s progression could feature many chosen bumps and still look fluid to the eyes of the right audience (as in the Die and retry genre).

In this article, I didn’t want to simply list cliché design mistakes that we are all aware of. Instead, it is a checklist. The notes below are a collection of potential reasons why your players might leave the game, ordered from the most to the least important one. Make sure to double check them all to keep players in the zone!

Why are players leaving your game? Or rather, why are they either frustrated or bored to the point they quit? Here are a few reasons.

1. Your game intro sucks

In pretty much every domain of their lives, people want to get started. They don’t want to wait before they can get a taste of what your title has to offer. From the very moment they start your application, you should give your users a reason to stay. At all times! Your title screen, your loading and your first level will make up for the players’ first impression of your game. This impression will stick with them, even if they don’t uninstall your game right away.

You can check our previous article for a more detailed rundown of the topic: How to create immersive intros.

Your title screen, your loading and your first level will make up for the players’ first impression Click To Tweet

2. Your game’s sessions are too long

We now have busy lives. Or maybe we don’t. But our modern society makes us feel like we haven’t got time anymore!

Chances are your players are overwhelmed with notifications and other polished apps trying to grab their attention. If you are creating a game for grown-ups, they likely have a day job and a family taking most of that time. They cannot afford to play for hours in a row.

It shouldn’t take a whole hour to go through a meaningful chunk of your game. Nor to reach the next checkpoint. This doesn’t mean that you have to follow the trend mobile games established, where 2-5 minutes long sessions is the norm. If you target experienced gamers, you can still get away with half an hour long sessions. And well, if you aim for the mobile market, you will have to make it possible for the users to play for as little as 3 minutes if you aim for a large audience.

The right session length of a desktop game depends on the type of project you are working on. But even MMORPGs like World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XIV made it possible for busy players to clear a normal dungeon in 15 to 30 minutes. MMOs tend to account more and more for the needs of a whole range of target users rather than a specific profile.

16 Reasons why players leave: Your game’s sessions are too long Click To Tweet

3. You are not targeting the right audience for your project

It wouldn’t be efficient to target 60 years old players with a Beat Them All.

Although this point is game design 101, it is always a good reminder. As designers, we build a framework of experiences for others. Because we can’t please everybody, we have to pick a target audience. That is to say a group of people whom we know will be interested in our creations. We have to study that audience. We have to go seek some of those individuals, get them to try out our product and give us feedback early on during development.

Picking the wrong audience also means dilapidating your marketing budget. Trying to appeal to the wrong users is utterly dangerous! It wastes both your time and your money.

16 Reasons why players leave: You are not targeting the right audience Click To Tweet

4. You are targeting a saturated fringe of the market

Alright, let us imagine that we nailed our audience: women of age 40 and above, mostly unexperienced players, who have some free time. With that hypothesis, we are creating the next fresh match-3 games. It is an original title, highly polished, it receives great feedback from the press and we are starting to build up a small fan base already.

Chances are it won’t work. Why? Because there are already plenty of good puzzle physics and match-3 games available out there. In particular, big companies like King have a large and faithful audience already. People won’t easily switch to other similar games, regardless of their quality.

We work in the entertainment industry. Although our games are our creations, they are still products sold on a market. Whenever we bring a new product out there, we have to make sure that it solves a need. There is no real need for new match-3s today.

And even if your production matches the quality of your competitors’ games, a company like King has something you will hardly outweigh. It has had a lasting positive relationship with its users.

5. You didn’t run enough tests

Nowadays, buggy games and software tend to be the norm, sadly. It is even surprising to see AAA titles released in a highly polished state, bug free! Yet bugs are a plague. Any quirk hurts the viability of your product, the smoothness of the experience it offers. Bugs frustrate the players (even if some are pretty funny!), thus can push them to uninstall your game.

We must have end users try out our games very early on. Almost from the very first prototypes! As independent developers in particular, we cannot track down every single bug in our games alone. Even if we take the role of a tester, we still have an exhaustive understanding of how our creation works that hinders our ability properly track down all of its defects.

6. Your tutorial slows down the player

Game Analytics for game developers Dark Souls 2’s tutorial is quick and accessible to all players, yet it is optional.

A tutorial shouldn’t force the experienced player through a long, boring, patronizing first game session. As the tutorial is often the first taste the player will have of your gameplay, it is critical to pay great attention to it. Here, I just want to stress out the fact that your tutorial should take in accounts the whole audience you are targeting.

If you are making a JRPG or an FPS, a fair part of your end users won’t need a tutorial at all. Don’t force them through it! Dark Souls 2 offers us an example of a great tutorial, contained in a both well-designed and optional area (you can run through straight through the main path to reach the game’s hub city).

If you want to learn a few more insights about what can break your tutorial experience, Ernest Adams compiled 8 Ways To Make a Bad Tutorial.

7.    Your game is too hard to pick up.

As independent developers or in small teams, we tend to do our own testing. We also balance our gameplay accordingly. However, the game’s difficulty should be calibrated against our target users’ skills, not our own. Iterative beta testing and the use of game analytics are key to staying objective with our game’s balance.

If the game offers an unfair and punishing first experience, the player will likely leave. Unexperienced users in particular. This is also true if your controls are unresponsive or imprecise. Poor controls make your game hard to pick up and unpleasant to play.

Uninstalls in the later stages of the game

Our first goal is to prevent players from leaving in the early game. Otherwise, they won’t play. But we also want them to keep playing until the later stages! On average, only a fraction of your players will ever see your game’s ending. They will quit the game before they reach that point. So here are some reasons why players may leave your game in the later stages.

8. Sudden rises in difficulty

Unwanted difficulty spikes will ruin the user’s experience. Don’t get me wrong: I am not saying that your game shouldn’t be hard. However, it should be fair at all times. The Souls series is a solid example of an unforgiving game with a beautiful difficult curve. It even lets the player choose his own difficulty, without knowing! Super Meat Boy and The Binding of Isaac are both very hard, and were successful.

9. Grosbilling or a backfiring grind

Being invincible for a few seconds in a Mario game feels great. Because it doesn’t last.

Do not forget that your game’s challenge has to match the player’s skills in order for him to stay in a state of flow. Flow is what will keep the player on your game ultimately. And it’s a tough balancing act!

In Skyrim, I remember reaching a point where dragons became a formality. My skinny thief could slay them with a single slice of a knife. This broke the immersion and the epic dimension of the universe for me. Guess what? That is also when I stopped playing.

10. The game relies too much on grinding, lacks intrinsic rewards

Grinding is a powerful tool. Used well, it boosts your player’s feel of skill progression. It offers concrete, quantifiable series of material rewards for the player. But grinding isn’t enough to make a great game.

Blizzard, the masters of grinding, still spend ages polishing the core mechanics, the visuals, and the background of their games. Diablo 3 is not only a hack and slash: it is a beautiful, dynamic action game. World of Warcraft features dozens of unique regions and dungeons to explore in groups! Although grinding is central to those 2 games, it is only present to reinforce their respective main qualities, their core gameplay.

11. The game requires a big time investment to become enjoyable

This used to be an issue with MMOs: The 4th Prophecy and other Dark Age of Camelot required the user to invest a lot of time before they could really enjoy the depth the gameplay had to offer. Once again, not all players nowadays can invest that time in a game. And as I showed above, most modern MMOs are adapting to this new user profile.

Final Fantasy XIII is an example of a single player game that features a 30 hours long tutorial. The game systems are shown one by one to the player during that period of time, along a linear path. Only thereafter, the game offers a huge open level. That is the main critique it received.

Your game should always offer some entertaining content early on.

The specifics of social and Free to Play games

The points outlined above should ring true for a wide range of games. Not all games are social, so that is why their specifics are coming last in this list.

Retention in Free to Play games have been and are being analyzed over and over. Most reasons of poor retention in Social Games are straightforward and easy to find on the Internet. Below, I have tried to pick a few not-so-intuitive reasons.

12. A toxic community

In “Social Games”, we can read the word “social”. Most of the time, those games are not really social: they bear that name only because they integrate interactions between the game and social networks. But multiplayer games generally offer a way for players to communicate with one another. Be it through a general chat, in game emotes and interactions, or private messaging.

Well, you should carefully track how your community builds up and evolves if players can chat in your game. An aggressive community towards rookie players will scare most of your new users away! Real social games need to have good community management.

13. Resources are too scarce

Zombie Catchers Zombie catchers makes it easy for the player to find more game accelerating resources by simply playing more.

That is one of the plagues of Free to Play titles. What people call Pay to Win, or as I like to call it, Free to Pay. If we give non-paying players too few resources to make good progress, they will soon feel frustrated. Be it in the early or later parts of the game.

Monetization strategies that revolve around forcing the users to pay don’t work. Throwing prominent ads at them to buy some more resources will result in the players leaving the game. As Seth Godin explains it very well in Permission Marketing, the users have plenty of alternatives to choose from. You are building a relationship with them. The design of your game shapes that relation.

14. Your game sessions feel empty

Following on the last point, social games players want to engage in a variety of activities in your game. Each gameplay session should feel lively and rewarding, regardless of its length. Using our previous example once again, Zombie Catchers stays fresh by alternating fun hunting based gameplay and some simple shop management. You can play for a few minutes and enjoy multiple gameplay phases.

15. Your game punishes inactive players

The 21st slide from Kongregate’s talk summary at the Casual Connect Asia in 2013 says it all. On one end, making it dangerous for the player not to come back to your game often will force him to get into a playing habit.

However, people need to take breaks. At any moment, your users may have to stop playing because of an important upcoming event. An exam maybe, or a birth…They also need to go on holidays sometimes. When they come back to your game, if they have lost their progress, their resources and their headquarters, they will likely quit. Instead you can reward an old user for coming back after a long absence! Fortifying their appreciation of the game.

16. Updates are not coming fast enough

Let us end with an easy one: social and multiplayer games need to be kept alive. If you want to retain users on the long run, you need to keep them busy or give them a reason to come back. Regular and substantial game updates, every 1 to 3 months, are key to staying in the mind of your users.

If your updates are slow, chances are your users will not only uninstall the game, but they might also forget to check it again later.

Summary

To sum up today’s article, players leave your games for 2 key reasons:

  • Boredom
  • Frustration, or anxiety

Those are your greatest enemies as a game designer. The antagonists of flow.

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18 minutes ago, Jozzie McTowel said:
Those are your greatest enemies as a game designer. The antagonists of flow.

tldr;

 

37 minutes ago, Jozzie McTowel said:

Here is the Steam stats from their in Steam stats page, it gives them a couple thousand extra players but still it's a horrible statistic.

It's early Saturday morning in the US. Paron us if we have our coffee before logging in and dealing with intellectual humans.

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38 minutes ago, Jean Lafitte said:

tldr;

 

It's early Saturday morning in the US. Paron us if we have our coffee before logging in and dealing with intellectual humans.

Ever heard of the backfire effect,  please read about it. but i doubt you do cause of tldr ignorance.

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20 hours ago, Jean Lafitte said:

LOL, еще раз, доказывая, что графики могут показать именно то, что вы хотите, чтобы они.

Вот, смотрите этот трюк. No Man's Sky против Атласа через 1 месяц после запуска.

SSE4bWR.png

О, нет! No Man's Sky - это DOOOOOMMMMMEEEEEDDDDDD !!!

*кашель*

 

Go to school, Losers

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It's still early and there's a 6 gigabyte patch people have to download (lol) but this is shaping up to be the worst weekend for Atlas yet in terms of player loss.

I wonder what Grapeshot tells themselves when they compare this disaster to Ark's successful first two months. "We're just too hardcore for our loser players"? Then they tinker with accordion buffs and make underwater structures invincible.

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@Jozzie McTowel Thanks for posting that article about why games fail. I read it and felt like it provided useful insights. I decided to do my own scoring of how I think Atlas is doing against these points. I am between work apts and limited on time atm, but here is I scored it:

I felt like point 8 I can’t evaluate because I have not yet done anything I’d regard as late stage content. Of the remaining 15...

6 points I think it passes or does well on. (3,4,6,13,14 &16) point 3 I feel like it passes but almost tries to fail on.

3 points I feel like Atlas is currently such a mixed bag on its hard to say one way or the other (1,7 & 15)

6 points it fails on imo. Points 2 & 9 I feel it fails on, but is at least heading in the right direction. Point 5 is an epic fail.

 

I think this list certainly leaves room for debate and discussion, but is certainly a useful tool for evaluating Atlas to date. Thanks again for contributing it to the discussion.

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7 hours ago, Percieval said:

Right. ARK is in the steam charts but ARK had a very bad EA period aswell. Almost identical to the one we're having right now. I'm not a crybaby getting out charts to somehow try to make a point that isn't really a point but thinks it's a point? Or something like that. If you want to go ahead with charts saying the playerbase loses people, be my guest. But it is pretty much only pointing out the obvious. But then again; Everyone needs something to bitch about. 

Ark had an awesome EA and stayed steady for almost 3 years. A couple of bad months here and there by nowhere near identical 😂

as we speak the atlas numbers are 2k lower than the lowest month ark every had and that was 3 and a half years later.

ark maintained its playerbase the entire time. Ea or not ea 

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6 hours ago, Jozzie McTowel said:
I suggest u read up on this and tell me on how many of these points u see do these devs fail, and don't just blame it on EA or the fact that this is still EA and they might be doing as the article suggests, they are doing it completely wrong. Keep in mind they should have plenty of experience of how they fucked up Ark in EA the last 4 years or so and then they even have the guts to throw such a shitshow of code at us with their own stubborn design choices and inability to use their eyes and brains at the same time to comprehend what this community was asking for when it was necessary. They might be fixing some stuff players have been asking for but in half ass way and far too late while still pumping out new features while core mechanics are still broken as fuck. Read it before u reply, yes it is a medium long read but it sure sums up how not to do it, and if u reflect how Atlas is being developed after u read it u will start to understand how bad it really is.
 
 
039c7e04a15ae25fbe9da13ff92bfac1?s=140&d

Nathan Lovato

Nathan is a game design expert at GameAnalytics. Currently founder and game design instructor at GDquest.

 

 

Players leave games. According to Marc Robinson’s 2013 GDC talk, “On average, less than 40% of players return to a free-to-play game after just one session.”

On average, less than 40% of players return to a free-to-play game after just one session! Click To Tweet

And as you know, our first duty as professional game designers is to create compelling experiences. We make games for the players to enjoy and play! If they leave our games too fast and too often, we have failed.

Thinking of the reasons why players are leaving your game is a great opportunity to put yourself in their shoes. Not only that, your financial success largely depends on the size and fidelity of your audience. In particular if you are monetizing your game with in-app purchases.

The data science team here at GameAnalytics recently unveiled the results of their latest study. The report shows that a strong player retention is correlated with your game’s financial success. In particular keeping your very first players entertained. This means that it is critical to retain users if you want to make a living off of your work.

There are but a few reasons why players are leaving your game. The 2 most important ones are frustration and boredom: the archenemies of flow. If you don’t know what flow is already, it is a mental state characterized by the feeling of energized focus and a complete absorption in a given activity. That is a state of deep enjoyment, if not passion. That is the state we want our players to fall into with our games! Regardless of the genre we going for.

This is, once again, our first duty as game designers – approached from the angle of positive psychology. A good player retention boils down to a design that calls for flow; a fluid and deeply rewarding experience. And please do not mistake that for a casual and grinding-based game! Your game’s progression could feature many chosen bumps and still look fluid to the eyes of the right audience (as in the Die and retry genre).

In this article, I didn’t want to simply list cliché design mistakes that we are all aware of. Instead, it is a checklist. The notes below are a collection of potential reasons why your players might leave the game, ordered from the most to the least important one. Make sure to double check them all to keep players in the zone!

Why are players leaving your game? Or rather, why are they either frustrated or bored to the point they quit? Here are a few reasons.

1. Your game intro sucks

In pretty much every domain of their lives, people want to get started. They don’t want to wait before they can get a taste of what your title has to offer. From the very moment they start your application, you should give your users a reason to stay. At all times! Your title screen, your loading and your first level will make up for the players’ first impression of your game. This impression will stick with them, even if they don’t uninstall your game right away.

You can check our previous article for a more detailed rundown of the topic: How to create immersive intros.

Your title screen, your loading and your first level will make up for the players’ first impression Click To Tweet

2. Your game’s sessions are too long

We now have busy lives. Or maybe we don’t. But our modern society makes us feel like we haven’t got time anymore!

Chances are your players are overwhelmed with notifications and other polished apps trying to grab their attention. If you are creating a game for grown-ups, they likely have a day job and a family taking most of that time. They cannot afford to play for hours in a row.

It shouldn’t take a whole hour to go through a meaningful chunk of your game. Nor to reach the next checkpoint. This doesn’t mean that you have to follow the trend mobile games established, where 2-5 minutes long sessions is the norm. If you target experienced gamers, you can still get away with half an hour long sessions. And well, if you aim for the mobile market, you will have to make it possible for the users to play for as little as 3 minutes if you aim for a large audience.

The right session length of a desktop game depends on the type of project you are working on. But even MMORPGs like World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XIV made it possible for busy players to clear a normal dungeon in 15 to 30 minutes. MMOs tend to account more and more for the needs of a whole range of target users rather than a specific profile.

16 Reasons why players leave: Your game’s sessions are too long Click To Tweet

3. You are not targeting the right audience for your project

It wouldn’t be efficient to target 60 years old players with a Beat Them All.

Although this point is game design 101, it is always a good reminder. As designers, we build a framework of experiences for others. Because we can’t please everybody, we have to pick a target audience. That is to say a group of people whom we know will be interested in our creations. We have to study that audience. We have to go seek some of those individuals, get them to try out our product and give us feedback early on during development.

Picking the wrong audience also means dilapidating your marketing budget. Trying to appeal to the wrong users is utterly dangerous! It wastes both your time and your money.

16 Reasons why players leave: You are not targeting the right audience Click To Tweet

4. You are targeting a saturated fringe of the market

Alright, let us imagine that we nailed our audience: women of age 40 and above, mostly unexperienced players, who have some free time. With that hypothesis, we are creating the next fresh match-3 games. It is an original title, highly polished, it receives great feedback from the press and we are starting to build up a small fan base already.

Chances are it won’t work. Why? Because there are already plenty of good puzzle physics and match-3 games available out there. In particular, big companies like King have a large and faithful audience already. People won’t easily switch to other similar games, regardless of their quality.

We work in the entertainment industry. Although our games are our creations, they are still products sold on a market. Whenever we bring a new product out there, we have to make sure that it solves a need. There is no real need for new match-3s today.

And even if your production matches the quality of your competitors’ games, a company like King has something you will hardly outweigh. It has had a lasting positive relationship with its users.

5. You didn’t run enough tests

Nowadays, buggy games and software tend to be the norm, sadly. It is even surprising to see AAA titles released in a highly polished state, bug free! Yet bugs are a plague. Any quirk hurts the viability of your product, the smoothness of the experience it offers. Bugs frustrate the players (even if some are pretty funny!), thus can push them to uninstall your game.

We must have end users try out our games very early on. Almost from the very first prototypes! As independent developers in particular, we cannot track down every single bug in our games alone. Even if we take the role of a tester, we still have an exhaustive understanding of how our creation works that hinders our ability properly track down all of its defects.

6. Your tutorial slows down the player

Game Analytics for game developers Dark Souls 2’s tutorial is quick and accessible to all players, yet it is optional.

A tutorial shouldn’t force the experienced player through a long, boring, patronizing first game session. As the tutorial is often the first taste the player will have of your gameplay, it is critical to pay great attention to it. Here, I just want to stress out the fact that your tutorial should take in accounts the whole audience you are targeting.

If you are making a JRPG or an FPS, a fair part of your end users won’t need a tutorial at all. Don’t force them through it! Dark Souls 2 offers us an example of a great tutorial, contained in a both well-designed and optional area (you can run through straight through the main path to reach the game’s hub city).

If you want to learn a few more insights about what can break your tutorial experience, Ernest Adams compiled 8 Ways To Make a Bad Tutorial.

7.    Your game is too hard to pick up.

As independent developers or in small teams, we tend to do our own testing. We also balance our gameplay accordingly. However, the game’s difficulty should be calibrated against our target users’ skills, not our own. Iterative beta testing and the use of game analytics are key to staying objective with our game’s balance.

If the game offers an unfair and punishing first experience, the player will likely leave. Unexperienced users in particular. This is also true if your controls are unresponsive or imprecise. Poor controls make your game hard to pick up and unpleasant to play.

Uninstalls in the later stages of the game

Our first goal is to prevent players from leaving in the early game. Otherwise, they won’t play. But we also want them to keep playing until the later stages! On average, only a fraction of your players will ever see your game’s ending. They will quit the game before they reach that point. So here are some reasons why players may leave your game in the later stages.

8. Sudden rises in difficulty

Unwanted difficulty spikes will ruin the user’s experience. Don’t get me wrong: I am not saying that your game shouldn’t be hard. However, it should be fair at all times. The Souls series is a solid example of an unforgiving game with a beautiful difficult curve. It even lets the player choose his own difficulty, without knowing! Super Meat Boy and The Binding of Isaac are both very hard, and were successful.

9. Grosbilling or a backfiring grind

Being invincible for a few seconds in a Mario game feels great. Because it doesn’t last.

Do not forget that your game’s challenge has to match the player’s skills in order for him to stay in a state of flow. Flow is what will keep the player on your game ultimately. And it’s a tough balancing act!

In Skyrim, I remember reaching a point where dragons became a formality. My skinny thief could slay them with a single slice of a knife. This broke the immersion and the epic dimension of the universe for me. Guess what? That is also when I stopped playing.

10. The game relies too much on grinding, lacks intrinsic rewards

Grinding is a powerful tool. Used well, it boosts your player’s feel of skill progression. It offers concrete, quantifiable series of material rewards for the player. But grinding isn’t enough to make a great game.

Blizzard, the masters of grinding, still spend ages polishing the core mechanics, the visuals, and the background of their games. Diablo 3 is not only a hack and slash: it is a beautiful, dynamic action game. World of Warcraft features dozens of unique regions and dungeons to explore in groups! Although grinding is central to those 2 games, it is only present to reinforce their respective main qualities, their core gameplay.

11. The game requires a big time investment to become enjoyable

This used to be an issue with MMOs: The 4th Prophecy and other Dark Age of Camelot required the user to invest a lot of time before they could really enjoy the depth the gameplay had to offer. Once again, not all players nowadays can invest that time in a game. And as I showed above, most modern MMOs are adapting to this new user profile.

Final Fantasy XIII is an example of a single player game that features a 30 hours long tutorial. The game systems are shown one by one to the player during that period of time, along a linear path. Only thereafter, the game offers a huge open level. That is the main critique it received.

Your game should always offer some entertaining content early on.

The specifics of social and Free to Play games

The points outlined above should ring true for a wide range of games. Not all games are social, so that is why their specifics are coming last in this list.

Retention in Free to Play games have been and are being analyzed over and over. Most reasons of poor retention in Social Games are straightforward and easy to find on the Internet. Below, I have tried to pick a few not-so-intuitive reasons.

12. A toxic community

In “Social Games”, we can read the word “social”. Most of the time, those games are not really social: they bear that name only because they integrate interactions between the game and social networks. But multiplayer games generally offer a way for players to communicate with one another. Be it through a general chat, in game emotes and interactions, or private messaging.

Well, you should carefully track how your community builds up and evolves if players can chat in your game. An aggressive community towards rookie players will scare most of your new users away! Real social games need to have good community management.

13. Resources are too scarce

Zombie Catchers Zombie catchers makes it easy for the player to find more game accelerating resources by simply playing more.

That is one of the plagues of Free to Play titles. What people call Pay to Win, or as I like to call it, Free to Pay. If we give non-paying players too few resources to make good progress, they will soon feel frustrated. Be it in the early or later parts of the game.

Monetization strategies that revolve around forcing the users to pay don’t work. Throwing prominent ads at them to buy some more resources will result in the players leaving the game. As Seth Godin explains it very well in Permission Marketing, the users have plenty of alternatives to choose from. You are building a relationship with them. The design of your game shapes that relation.

14. Your game sessions feel empty

Following on the last point, social games players want to engage in a variety of activities in your game. Each gameplay session should feel lively and rewarding, regardless of its length. Using our previous example once again, Zombie Catchers stays fresh by alternating fun hunting based gameplay and some simple shop management. You can play for a few minutes and enjoy multiple gameplay phases.

15. Your game punishes inactive players

The 21st slide from Kongregate’s talk summary at the Casual Connect Asia in 2013 says it all. On one end, making it dangerous for the player not to come back to your game often will force him to get into a playing habit.

However, people need to take breaks. At any moment, your users may have to stop playing because of an important upcoming event. An exam maybe, or a birth…They also need to go on holidays sometimes. When they come back to your game, if they have lost their progress, their resources and their headquarters, they will likely quit. Instead you can reward an old user for coming back after a long absence! Fortifying their appreciation of the game.

16. Updates are not coming fast enough

Let us end with an easy one: social and multiplayer games need to be kept alive. If you want to retain users on the long run, you need to keep them busy or give them a reason to come back. Regular and substantial game updates, every 1 to 3 months, are key to staying in the mind of your users.

If your updates are slow, chances are your users will not only uninstall the game, but they might also forget to check it again later.

Summary

To sum up today’s article, players leave your games for 2 key reasons:

  • Boredom
  • Frustration, or anxiety

Those are your greatest enemies as a game designer. The antagonists of flow.

Wow that guy basically said they were a horrible dev company and the game would fail. He isnt wrong about any of that stuff

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26 minutes ago, Realist said:

Ark had an awesome EA and stayed steady for almost 3 years. A couple of bad months here and there by nowhere near identical 😂

as we speak the atlas numbers are 2k lower than the lowest month ark every had and that was 3 and a half years later.

ark maintained its playerbase the entire time. Ea or not ea 

Never said that though. I’m saying ARK had a shitty EA time too. Same as this one, it feels like an exact repeat. 

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I just wanted to add that a very large portion of the players still playing are playing on PRIVATE servers not the official game servers. 

Most of the zones I sailed through (over 20) had around 10 or less players in the zone. the most i saw in one zone was around 25 players.  

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1 hour ago, Percieval said:

Never said that though. I’m saying ARK had a shitty EA time too. Same as this one, it feels like an exact repeat. 

Ah ok. I thought you were talking numbers.  Yeah ark had a bad ea time as well as far as development. But then again the original members of wildcard are here with atlas now. 

Ever since wildcard got some new employees over there they have been kicking butt bringing out a lot of new stuff.

so yeah you are right about the ea development wise. Ark was a Dino game though. There have already been multiple pirate games. There is a pretty clear difference in playerbase though, I withink we can all admit that.

5 minutes ago, Bad Penny said:

I just wanted to add that a very large portion of the players still playing are playing on PRIVATE servers not the official game servers. 

Most of the zones I sailed through (over 20) had around 10 or less players in the zone. the most i saw in one zone was around 25 players.  

Yeah if you go through battle metrics and look at official servers the highest was like 45 or something. The game isn’t dead yet because Unofficials are its life support.

if there were only officials though. It would have already been dead

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