Phoenix Point declining player-base

Do you have idea that something like 40% of players in the stats haven’t started the game? And game can be casual even if you finish it on other difficulties without any restrictions. That was just one example. And you realise that even if game is for casual doesn’t require them to finish the game to prove that statement? Game can be for casuals and can be boring at some point, so people will not finish it. So percent of completed campaigns doesn’t matter here. I hope now you understand your point better. :wink: So you misinterpret stats and give false statements.

That is irrelevant. The claim would be still true as I presented it.

Also the actual number of users which did not start the game, would be 21.3%. As 78.7% of the players have at least one achievement. 21.3% is not 40%.

You can say that discounting the players who did not start the game (no idea why anyone would want them to try the game I guess); you would only be excludding 78% of the “real” players labeling them as casuals. Do you want a game that only appeals to 20% of its players? That hardly is convenient is it?

Now you can also say that your number would be accurate if you say 40% having got no more than the most common 8 achievements. But that is not what you said, your statement is false. Why would you present false stats that can be easily disproved to justify a false accusation is beyond me.

You accused me me lying when I presented accurate stats, followed by presenting easily dekunkable false stats… still have no Idea why.

It does matter because you were the one who divided the game on two groups: casuals and hardcores, presenting Legend as very easy difficulty, so all hardcore players being under your assumptions in the group of the people that finished the game on legend is more than a fair assessment of what you imply.

And a white and black fallacy is still a fallacy and an ivalid way to argue.

If you will loose all soldiers in a first few missions it will be game over. Loosing one or two per mission will be a very painful experience. Sure, experienced player most likely will endure and recover, but casual on the other hand will most likely quit. I just doubt early game could be fun for casual player and it may turn into nightmare very easily. :slight_smile:

Apart from game design, there are illogical and frustrating situations and large part of casuals will rebound.

I would say, not only casuals. Most players would actually quit. I would, and I consider myself an experienced player with 130h on the game. But I guess I would be a casual player under his assuptions, since I dont see myself going above veteran anytime soon, so there is that.

There is a dangerous worm crawlling here. As many people here are in the buble of PP enaged users in the forum and are mostly all very experienced in the game. In many cases people here is not willing to consider that the ammount of players who finished the game, but did not on legend are actually 10 times the number of players that actually finished the game on legend, probably because many think legend is too difficult for their taste (I am in that group).

To me the game in on the hard side of strategy games, I love it, but I admit that I struggle a lot with it sometimes. But looking at these forums, it seems that this group, who are likely most of the active players does not exist and their views are constantly ignored and talked down. When not plainly attacked and labelled as casual players who do not want to think and have no place here.

I certainly feel like that sometimes reading these forums. And I am an engaged user and an active player. To have this kind of elitist group thinking is very harmful. This way of thinking is actually vanishing people from the community and the game. Many may think that is ok and would make the game better. But it is not and it hurts PP.

Engine is right, its game progression, Panda evolution and mission repetition (some balancing and bugs) that need rework.

Its great archievement “its not yet another Xcom copy” - has its own story, universe etc.

It also has element of 4X4 Civ like games, and there I would like more freedom and less fixation to defend heavens - destroy nests / citadels etc.

Just like in old UFO (in that sense) Pandas could have many different missions and do various things beside terror missions - heaven defences.

My main problems are fast paced development early with late on waiting for something to be resarched or diplomacy level reached.

Why not having more proactive diplomacy to boost ranks with factions?
Why not having more freedom to explore then constant fly-back to defend?

Surely, you can let Pandas destroy factions, but you loose too much (resources, prestige with fractions, recruit and raid point)

Mid to end game is half boredom of repetition, half madness with total faction war.

Instead I propose small regional wars.

Also defending the Earth everywhere and fixing X bases is too much. Freedom to build bases, and not so many active Panda bases is right approach.

A lot can be done in this engine, but impression is developers push it this way, like they dont have player and testing team input.

Real team does not ignore its players recommendations. In team selected players test game to reveal bugs and needed fixes.

I am constantly arguing for that inclusion. And myself posted a couple of suggestion on that direction on the feedback tool. But I don’t think will happen anytime soon.

https://forums.snapshotgames.com/t/dynamic-conflict-between-factions/

1 Like

Going back to the original point of the forum.

Why do you think gear tactics is doing far worse than Phoenix Point, and Battletech is doing on the other hand, much better?

Yes, I am also there, defending the whole Earth and missions all over are simply overstreching and require so many teams and development that they eventually exhaust the player.

Like in CIv, picking part of map (Earth) that could be ENLARGED and then POIs and missions radomized, with FREEDOM to build bases, would best solution.

Also from Civ6 one could pick very nice EVOLUTION towards players action: If one shoots with sniper a lot he would get proficient and more skilled, game would be more natural. All soldiers start generic and flat YOU specialize them. This is like fixed RPG that requires lot of missions (hours)

but my 1.5 years or so impression is that developers are either blind and deaf, or never test the game :slight_smile: Its @JulianG good name that is hurt the most, as his name was major attraction point. Overall design and engine are great, something went wrong in campaign design and Panda evolution choice.

First of all, they do not reflect promise of adoptive tactics and organs at all.

So, rework how games roll, engine and backstory and anims are MAGNIFICENT as well as enemy (and faction units) designs.

No level of injected DLC can solve the players experience in this matters.

That Im not sure is actually true. Granted @JulianG receved a blow with the epic deal. (which makes hard even trying to asses how well is doing PP in terms of players). But the game has been so far succesful.

SG claimed to have a 191% return on investment soon after release without considering steam sales. There is a dedicated fan base, even if the game is also heavily critisized, but I doubt most people even disliking the game does not apreciate the scope and ambition of the design. Even if for many the game was frustrating and has many problems too. But is hard to deny the creativity, scope, effort and ambition of PP.

PP may be a bad game for many, but it is objectively not a lazy, explotative, overmonitized or uninteresting one. I dont think Kojima was hit by the mixed reviews and hate of Death Stranding, and I think @JulianG will also not be hurt by PP. Instead as the game seem to have been profitable is a chance to improve and become even more recognized.

I completely disagree, all the main problems seem to be of balance. Balance can be fixed, and has improved already. Maybe it will not solve all the problems, but I see no reason to say many of them cannot be solved.

But the game is profitable on hope and promise that wasn’t delivered. That’s why declining player-base is very bad. If they want to stay profitable they need to stop any development. Otherwise they will be throwing good money after bad leading to a situation where “profitable” state will be not any more. They didn’t convince people to buy the game after “promise / hope” phase. And it seems that they don’t want to invest in new promotion so its probably some learning phase now for some devs for some next project and Phoenix Point is not any important goal in their minds any more.

If I promise you some excellent product, and you give me money, and I give you some shit later then Yes I’m profitable. But so what? Reputation is not based on promise gimmicky selling but real product you deliver.

But is it? How bad is the player decline? It went from 5k players after release to an average of 500 in the following months. With a nice increase with the new DLC.

Yes, the number of players was never great, but it did not have any sharp decline (like gear tactics which is doing insanely bad on steam) but a soft continuous one that is more than expected for any game without mods, and yes it shows that a small amount of players were not happy at release, so the initial typical month of a flat line in steam was not there. But on the other hand, even XCOM or civilization VI had a supersharp decline of players at release, like most of the player base only played those games for one day, much more sharp than any decline PP had ever.

Games such as gear tactics or chimera squad have a strong start, keep the players for a month, and then the player count goes to almost zero. Other games keep doing well for a long time, but those are always superpopular games, games with mods, or games receiving a lot of updates or with online components.

You also need to consider that the peak player numbers was never high ever in PP and there is no way of knowing the Epic player stats.

Here is an example of the 4.5 month evolution of some games (rough) after release, I used the variable 4-5 months to not include major expansions and avoid ending in an uncharacteristic peaks.

  • Battletech: 35k to 4k. Retained 25%
  • Civ VI: 162k to 30k. Retained 18%
  • Phoenix P: 5k to 500. Retained 10% (moderate increase with new DLC just after)
  • XCOM2: 132k to 10k. Retained 7.5%.
  • XCOM1: 70k to 6k. Retained 8.5%
  • Gear T: 6k to 200. Retained 3.3%
  • Empire oS: 7K to 200. Retained 2.8% (sharp increase with new expansion just after)
  • Chimera S: 15k to 500. Retained 1,3%.

So… most game lose 90% of their player base on the first 6 months. including PP, but where do you see that PP has done very well at release and then everybody stopped playing, or that it has a worse player decline than most titles? Because it does not feel like it to me. What it has was a very bad start in steam (probably because the epic deal). And we don’t have any way of knowing how the epic evolution was. So any claim in that regard is completely unsupported. and certainly the new players in steam did not dislike the game more than they disliked any successful strategy game.

You also claim the game was profitable on hope and promise that wasn’t delivered. Excluding the epic exclusive, I don’t think that was the case at all. I have not seen any claim of the game being not at all what was promised outside some unsupported claims, and some comment on water missions (I think the goal was not even reached on Kickstarter). Which I think the game does not need.

The game may not have fulfilled the expectations of many, and the epic exclusive certainly made many angry. But how much much of the game content which was promised has not been delivered?

  • Vehicles (yes).
  • Boss battles (yes).
  • Turn bassed squad battles (yes).
  • Soldier developement (yes).
  • Weapons and equipement (yes).
  • Procedural destructible enviroments (yes).
  • Geoscape (yes).
  • Missions (yes)
  • Human factions (yes).
  • Giant alien land walkers (yes, we have bosses and artillery and behemots now).
  • A mutating alien threat (yes).
  • Underwater missions (no, but goal not reached).
  • Foating phoenix base (no, but maybe on upcoming DLCs).

So what I am missing here?. We seem like one of the few fan communities that hate the game they are fans of, quite unfairly If you ask me.

Also the game had less than 700K for development. Which is around ten times less the resources a game such as XCOM has. do you really think PP under delivered? Because I don’t think so.

It has many balance problems, yes. But claiming backers have been scammed is in my opinion ridiculous in terms of the delivered game content.

The achingly slow pace of PP and the disconnectedness of the strategy layer from the tactics one is so disappointing. The game is so damn good in various aspects, but it’s like finding diamonds in the mud. And there’s so much mud. I’ve never tried so hard in a game as PP to pass through a layer of confusion to get to the good stuff. Just … why … makes it seem like UFO Defence was a fortunate accident.

I have played it over 100 hours and I’m still waiting for it to go somewhere. It’s plodding and the number of things to do on the world map, often concurrently, makes the experience feel like seconds are experienced more as days. I sit there, bewildered, as I click between my deployed ships and wrap through them over and over and over. This layer is exceedingly obtuse: needs constraints, shaping.

This game needed a user journey mapped before being built and then an execution that was framed in such a way that it could be fast tuned (which it should have been, regularly), and yes – modded. This game feels like it was made without an understanding of what consumers expect in gaming nowadays. I have also heard Julian in a podcast say things like cosmetics don’t matter. Oye, out of sync with us.

Listen to your consumers. Let them guide you. You aren’t the best, at least not anymore. We’re here to elevate you so that your creative can shine again. The new XCom cannot hold a candle to the original one, nor to Terror from the Deep, nor even the third one, IMO, which was also pure crack. Come back to us, your intuition needs a lift and we’ll provide that to you. Just pay attention and take us seriously.

2 Likes

You are describing separate things.

Pace and lenght: yes the game is too long and as a result, it feels stuck.
Progression: The game has progression systems, but is not like tiers of armors and guns or linear improvement of stats. this is an intentional design choice that makes the game unique, but it is hard to deal with, because players expect linear progression. Even if most linear progressions are actually artificial, because those ganmes scale linearly difficulty as well. In the end I kind of like it, and with more variety the game could be great with the current design.
Story: I actually love this, the issue is that the game feels too long so may events are very spaced out.

These are issues and I think chosing the duration of the campaign wiould actually address it. But in some way is also one of the strengths of the game, and the moment to moment game almost makes up for it. Though granted, if you want to see were the story is going the current length of the campaign is a drawback.

What you miss is that the game development is a business. There are hundrends games being produced every year. Only small amount of them survive long-term and build game franchaises. We’re talking like 1-5% of them surviving and probably 5% of those only have long-term success. Phoenix Point is simply dying and if DLCs won’t sell, you will have funeral at the end of this DLC cycle with some note from devs that will tell you they’re stopping work on PP because it was a tremendous success.

It doesn’t matter that they found some 500 people who play the game and think it’s good. It’s too low to survive on the market. As for numbers you gave we can’t look at “exact” numbers because Phoenix was on Epic, so doing any sort of comparisons will not give anything useful for we don’t have numbers. But I can tell you that starting numbers for Phoenix were probably way higher. Remember this game had fantastic visibility on Twitch and Youtube when it came out. There were doznens and doznes youtubers doing it. And from all of this 1,5 year later you get playerbase very small even though you’re producing stuff. That means that you have terrible retention of your product.

As I said we have numbers from YT, Twitch and Steam to have some sort of clue where things stand. And they don’t stand in any reasonable shape for me. Games with those numbers are forgotten within 1-2 years. When devs will stop this DLC cycle, there will be no moders to keep game alive, so playerbase will go to Chaos Reborn level. And yeah maybe they will think of some sort of sequel. But they didn’t deliver any long-term playerbase and they won’t pull second kickstarter off on Phoenix Point. So…

I won’t tell you why all those poeple who saw the game didn’t bought it or why the ones that bought stop playing, coz I don’t know. But the numbers are the numbers. You simply can’t think about a game with 300 constant players per hour as a long-term franchise. Maybe if you’re Tynan Sylvester and make the game as a hobby. Otherwise in studio work you’re constricted by the market because you have costs and other things to worry about.

So you are claiming that the game had a sharp decline compared to other games because it has now lower visibility on Twitch and Youtube without any contenxt or info about that. You are not supporting your claim with any evidence at all.

The only data we have shows a 10% retention of players in Steam in the 5 months after launch. An actually higher retention than XCOM1, XCOM2, Gear Tactics, Empire o Sin and Chimera Squad in the same time, if lower than Battletech or Civ VI (Look numbers above).

You are making just a subjective statement based on the perceived decline of players, being a decline of players true for all games, and your perception not being useful to tell us anything, and without any context or any data to support it. So the claim is completely useless.

Saying something is true, does not make it true. All what you have said is actually compatible with the game doing fairly well.

And no, the numbers from numbers YT, Twitch and Steam do not support your claim. the numbers from steam would disprove your claim, and you have no numbers from YT or Twitch or any context to compare. So if you go just by the evidence, you need to conclude:

There is no reason to assume there is a significant decline in the players of PP compared to any succesful game of the genre.

That is how facts work.

There is no point in analysing retention if you have 400 players. And the player number is declining.

Yes I agree that almost all games (not all) have decline. This is quite common. The problem is when this decline is below certain treshold. You need to have some sort of playerbase to claim succes on the market. Most games don’t have those numbers because most games simply don’t survive.

The player base is now actually increasing with the new DLC.

Yes there is a point in analysing retention. And 500 concurrent players are not a bad number at all for a game that launched with 5000 in steam. The point is that is an indication on how popular the game is.

Actually all have decline. It is just that some games still retain some players for a long term.

Games dont need to survive. They are a product, no game keeps its dev cycle forever. They can only be profitable or not profitable. PP has been profitable, so is a succesful product. And succesful enough to warrant support and new content till December.

If the new content brings more sales the game may keep going. And nothing else matters includding the number of current players.

We’ll see with time if it’s increasing and for how long. Currently this bump-up is small. I gave numbers before on XCOM2 DLC WofC. It got from 10.000 to 47.000 avarage players per hour and it stayed there for 2 months.

If in two months PP player numbers will get below 100 this DLC won’t be any success. If you sell new product it’s not good if the 6-year old one is still doing better. That’s a bad sign that you’re missing sth obvious here and not delivering enough.

PP has been profitable, so is a succesful product.

As I said profitabilty is not good measure because you can sell product in preorder scheme, make money and deliver some underdeveloped product which almost nobody wants and everybody throws it away right after they get it. This is your success definition?

Games dont need to survive.

No. Most games have to survive. You think they make game thinking who cares if someone plays it? You think they really sit there and “We care only about our kickstarter money and have them all in places”. I don’t think so. I think they all care about success and the need to survive which is buiding constant playerbase. And if they want to make money over time they need to “survive”.And for that you need to build stable playerbase otherwise you will be still trying to gimmick some overpromised scheme and trying hide that you can’t deliver it. For how long you think you can trick people in that way? They pulled that off once. I can’t think the people, who bought it and are mad, are thinking right now “when next kickstarter starts”.

Current player counts on Steam are not necessarily old long standing players, but also includes new players.

1 Like

Current player counts on Steam are not necessarily old long standing players, but also includes new players.

I agree. This is not ideal measure. But it’s good enough to show trends. Sometimes you don’t need to have all knowledge to make conclusions. You check proxies for trends and you can make precise enough observations and tell what’s going on. Like Steam numbers show some sort of reaction on DLC. We don’t need to see SnapShot balancesheet to tell how big this reaction is. The steam shows us what we can expect. We can add other inputs like YT, Twitch etc. This is quite common in forecasting.