Starfield

It's the "forever game" brainrot. Nowadays people expect games to be updated and played forever as the one game they will play. Even single player games.

This mindset sort of originated from MMORPGs but leeched into other games including singleplayer ones. Just look at how people approach playing singleplayer Minecraft. Or Zelda TOTK. They act like the game is shit because they got bored of it like no shit, you have 500 hours in Zelda TOTK. Learn to put down a game. Minecraft is even more extreme. People are expecting the game to remain appealing in single player a good decade after it's initial release.

People need to understand that they're allowed to get bored of a game and move on to the next one. That their refusal to move on way beyond the games intended lifespan does not mean that a game is bad.

So the reason why the plummeting playercount is "bad", is because it makes it less likely for DLC and updates being pushed which are required to maintain a "forever game"

That's kinda what the article says though

It can be an indicator of post-launch performance. In this case, it performed well at launch but has now stablised like most games do. By my metrics, 30k a day is pretty good at a glance. You'd have to find more actual comparisons to make informed conclusions though, which you sort of find if you go through Forbes' source which is a quote tweet of an article from GamingBolt ( just link the article lmao):

Cyberpunk 2077 may have seen a major new update and a paid expansion, Phantom Liberty, but that was in September. It’s sitting at 23rd in the most-played games chart on Steam, with a 24-hour peak of 36,246. Starfield is currently in 43rd place behind games like Elden Ring, Valheim, Stardew Valley and Terraria.

There are more paragraphs with the same vibe, with the obvious disclaimer that it's on game pass too. But there's a number of other things that would go into an actual performance analysis. e.g, are the "competing" games currently on sale? What other factors affect the current landscape of games played? What do each of these games' numbers look like in the same time period following their launch?

That's the kind of data the publishers have access to and do actual analysis on. I think this reporting is just chasing a trend for engagement. 22 - 30k is not bad for a singleplayer game without mod support (yet) which people will pick up, play, and put down. I don't see anything to indicate it's "in trouble" (we'd probably have heard by now of internal planning changes at Bethesda if that were the case).

Actually, the article linked is pretty much making the point that the player numbers don't matter that much. Or at least that all the trolls using those numbers as evidence are at the very least, premature.

It's one of the very few indicators we have, and pretty much the only one that's not controlled by the publisher or devs.

Yup, pretty similar to Cyberpunk... really rough launch state with the potential to be an amazing game in the long run. The eternal question, though, us whether it'll get the love it needs.

@emptyother @ylai Yeah I don't understand why they're so slow at pushing updates out. Could they be preparing a big one ?

It's interesting to see compared to skyrim or fallout where in a lot of cases you would fast travel. But without having a choice the immersion is entirely gone

You can actually do that, it just takes forever. Why there is no option to fly manually there faster though is anyone's guess.

I always thought the play with Bethesda games was "wait until the second or third GotY Special Edition release so you don't get quadruple dipped on season passes and stuff packs; then boot your load order organizer of choice and stuff it sideways with Nexus content" anyway; you mean there's really people who year zero'd Starfield?

Planetary vehicles seems like such an obvious missing feature. They must have figured out it was too hard to do in their engine or had other technical reasons for omitting them. Every time I'm mindlessly running for several kilometers of procedural bland terrain I wish that could be a more fun experience.

That Phil guy for the List quest was so creepy to interact with; staring eyes and a big grin for no reason. It bugs me that every character in starfield stares directly at the camera. In Skyrim, the npc would often continue what they were doing when talking (such as continuing to blacksmith)

Thats save bloat. It technically affects all games with a save system, but bethesda games can get hit hard because it saves the locations of every object in every cell you visit.