Thanks for the rundown; I might pick it up for future entertainment.
47000 peak today. 3/4ths of the peak user base gone in under a week.
I do wonder how unusual this is, though. I wonder how many of, say, Far Cry 4’s peak player base was gone in a week, or Fallout 4.
Actually, there’s something called steamcharts.com!
Far Cry 4 seems unfair, since it was also sold on uplay and so doesn’t require steam.
Fallout 4 needs Steam, and had a player peak of 472k, in the November of release. In December, that had dropped to a peak of 201k, and then January down to 120k.
GTA 5 had a similar curve - peak of 360k, dropping to 215k the month after and then a sudden drop to 85k the month after.
No Man’s Sky has that 212k peak, but the drops come by the day, not the month, are they, as SenorBeef says, already down to a 47k peak after only a week. I just don’t think this game is going to be being played by more than 10k 2 months from now.
Still top of the sales chart though, so maybe I’m wrong.
Yeah, I mentioned upthread that a few months after release steamcharts just starts using weekly or monthly averages, not daily, so you can’t see the same day by day data. But I do monitor this sort of thing just as an interest hobby - I like to see how games are received and how communities thrive and die. I can’t go back to those other big hyped releases and post the daily data since it isn’t there, but my memory of it is that games fall off about 8-15% for the first few days and then level off somehwere around 60-80% of their initial high losing a few percent a day over the next few weeks.
Depends on the type of game, too. A game with a linear story and not much replay value will fall harder after people beat it than games that are more open ended which often maintain their player base and grow.
As a comparison game we have full daily data on with a popular release, starbound, which is actually sort of similar in that it’s an interplanetary exploration/survival game, the first week peaks were 61k, 52k, 50k, 46k, 42k, 40k, 43k, 44k. That’s a much more typical pattern - losing a few percent a day, and even recovering a bit towards the end, the last two days being weekend days.
Another recent popular release: Total War: Warhammer’s first week peaks are 112k, 104k, 97k, 90k, 92k, 99k, 93k. In comparison to these, NMS is a nose dive straight off a cliff losing 3/4ths of its player base in less than a week.
The NMS drop-off is actually worse than it looks, because day 2 and 3 were bolstered by bein Saturday and Sunday, days that typically receive a boost. If it were released on a Tuesday on PC as is typical, it would’ve fallen off much harder on wed/thurs/friday.
Those figures are worrying. I really hope Hello Games / Sony doesn’t give up on this. The tech has so much potential, and it really seems like they needed another six months, if only Sony had the ability for developers to sell games early access I think it would have had a really different reception.
I’m going to buy this because I really want No Mans Sky 2 to exist and to be amazing, but I’d rather hold off on actually playing it until a few more patches and content updates. They’re saying that base building will be coming as a free update, and PlayStation VR support seems like a no brainer as well. Hopefully it will get a big boost in numbers if it’s released as a bundle with the PS VR, and will be in a more finished state then as well.
The game already sold about 10-20x as many copies as it really should’ve, so I don’t think it needs more sales to justify a NMS 2, and throwing your money at a game that was overpromised and massively disappointing, where probably more money was spent on marketing it to people for a big day one launch than developing/improving the game seems like rewarding the exact wrong behavior to me. They’ve already got tons of people who bought it but aren’t playing it because it isn’t good enough - I don’t understand what adding one more player to that category will do.
It seems to me like you’re saying that you’re going to buy it after knowing it was a disappointment… because it was a disappointment… which seems among the stranger motivations I’ve seen.
Personally, I’m addicted as hell to the game.
I’ve actually spent these last two days on one single moon. It’s nearly airless, and has no plant life and damn little vegetation. What it *does *have, though, is lots of Korvax outposts and ruins. And *tons *of crashed ships, which is how I ended up on it in the first place.
I originally found a crash site, and decided to take that ship as my own. To be efficient, I took everything apart in my old ship, then took custody of the new one…
And then realized that I didn’t have enough zinc to get the engines running on the new one.
There’s lots of plutonium, iron, and aluminum on this rock, but no zinc deposits. Furthermore, since there’s no vegetation to speak of, there aren’t even any of those flowers that can be harvested for resources.
The only thing I could do was start walking. And walking. And walking. Eventually, I found three more crash sites, and I was able to salvage enough zinc from those to finally get a ship flying.
It felt like a game adaptation of The Martian. The moon even *looks *like Mars.
I’m finally playing it. Life means I only get an hour or two at a time, but am enjoying it so far.
I’m going to buy it because I don’t believe there was any intent to deceive. This game was clearly a passion project and from the interviews Sean and Hello Games really wanted to be able to deliver all the things they mentioned. That features had to be cut to make shipping date is somewhat understandable, and so far they’ve said there will be additional content patches for free.
Besides I’m not a starving student and it looks very pretty and like at the very least it will be interesting for 6-10 hours or so. I don’t need to get 100 hours of gameplay out of a $60 game to make it worthwhile.
Angry Joe’s verdict: 5/10. Frankly I think it should be lower.
He’s spot on on every criticism, and on the incredibly misleading statements and marketing on the game. He Dubs it: No Man’s Sky? More like One Man’s Lie.
Good review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTTPlqK8AnY
coremelt, you are operating under a huge misconception here if you really believe this:
I encourage you to give Joe’s video a look. It’s interspersed with actual statements by the lead dev, WEEKS before the game shipped which were outright lies.
I’m not going to watch a 36 minute video review, got better things to do. I’m a software developer myself, software development is hard, something like No Man’s Sky is beyond my comprehension hard. From what I read they pulled a bunch of features near the end because of complex bug interactions and Sony wasn’t willing to let them delay it again.
Shit happens, and if you’ve accepted a publishing deal you don’t get to make the decisions about when to ship. Hello Games is not an independently wealthy software development house like Valve who can just ship stuff “when it’s done”. They say there are going to put back as many of the cut features as possible as free updates, I’ll give them a chance to do that.
I’m a software developer too. I would never tell my client that the software they are paying for has feature x and y two days before shipping a release version, when my software does not in fact have feature x or y.
THAT is the issue. Not that these things, dozens of features, aren’t there, but that they said they were going to be there when they sure as hell knew they weren’t, and wouldn’t be, given the current state of the game, any time soon if ever. these aren’t things they can patch in in a few weeks or even months. These are features that are going to take YEARS to put in the game… I’m doubting we’ll see any substantial improvements aside from some of the UI stuff. Though polishing up some basic mechanics and adding more diversity in terms of what you are doing and crafting might go a long way.
Cite please that there are major gameplay elements that Sean was claiming were in the game two days before shipping that aren’t?
I checked a couple of article’s talking about “lies” by the developer, all the major gameplay feature stuff was mentioned four months before release. Four months out I can believe they intended to include some of that stuff but couldn’t. If indeed they have already worked on a bunch of these features but just couldn’t fix all the bug interactions then yes they can add them back in within months.
And really I don’t care about what was promised, what I care about is, is the delivered result fun to play? Will I get a minimum of 20 hours of enjoyment out of it? Given the types of games I enjoy and what other people have told me, yes I will.
What is there, by most critic’s estimation is not worth $60.
Weird, but I personally tend to take umbrage at being sold a $60 product based on a pack of lies. YMMV, obviously.
My cite is the video and this reddit post: Reddit - Dive into anything
Even a lot of stuff that was mentioned 4 months ago it’s just not stuff that anyone with a handle on a project would claim to be in the game - given the current state of the game, a lot of the features mentioned were CLEARLY not implemented in any way whatsoever.
Anyway, I know you have better things to do, so I won’t engage you anymore. Just wanted to clarify, for the sake of other posters, that your original thoughts about you believing the devs were not attempting to deceive, to be an opinion you can’t really support given the facts.
I hope you at least attempt to read a review or two. There are a LOT of issue with the game, from instability on PS4 to performance on PC, to UI being a mess, to the core mechanics being extremely boring and repetitive, to issues/bugs that make resource gathering a pain, etc, etc. I think you should at least wait for some of this stuff to be fixed. Otherwise, sincerely, I hope you enjoy the game.
Yeah I read that post, there is an updated version of it here:
In short, no he was not making outrageous claims two days before release. Second a bunch of stuff that was in that original Reddit post IS actually in the game, they just hadn’t played long enough to see it. The website I linked includes corrections.
They claim to be adding in a bunch of new features as free updates, given how ambitious what they are trying to do is, I’m willing to give them a bit of slack and see what they come up with.
For us non-software people: I’m under the impression that it’s fairly common in software to “just get the sale” by promising features for a release that’s months away based more on hope than foresight. Is this the case?
I’ve wondered about many of these games which have lots of assets (procedural or not), whether it’s most Ubisoft games or NMS. It seems that they’re often shallow on gameplay but full of stuff. As AngryJoe said, they’re wide as an ocean and deep as a puddle. Is it not simpler and cheaper to come up with some gameplay innovations than make so many assets or build an NMS-style procedural generation algorithm? It’s like a shit buffet.
It’s common in business for salespeople to make promises they can’t keep (or require hundreds of hours of custom development to keep).
It’s a bit different in gaming. Word gets out pretty quick if a developer released a crappy game.
I find it’s not that uncommon in gaming, however, for a game to get really hyped up and then fail to deliver what players expected. Particularly with these open-universe exploration games (Spoore comes to mind).
Hello Games had never released a game of this scope before, thats a very different situation to Peter Molyneaux repeatedly promising outrageous things even after being the lead designer on dozens of games. Pending further evidence I’m willing to put down the promises earlier in the development cycle as over enthusiasm by an inexperienced development team rather than a cynical ploy to get sales.
Of course if they now stop working on NMS and give up on it, then thats different. If as they claim they deliver a bunch of content patches for free then personally I’d forgive them for earlier overly optimistic claims.
As late as the IGN interview he did which was only a month before release? He was talking about multi-player interactions. They never corrected this information either, or any of the other stuff they said would be in the game.
I can’t fathom how you could possible think this is just some case of wishful thinking. They knew what they were shipping, and they knew what they were shipping wasn’t what everyone thought this game would be. And no, this wasn’t just because of over hyped expectations, but because of inaccurate descriptions of the product that were never corrected, and misleading marketing materials.
That’s what I’m going to do to, I’m just not going to buy it until they’ve done it.