The Dead Linger Steam
Mariela Coxon
This first steam chart comparison is between 7 Days to Die (Green), The Forest (Blue), Subnautica (Orange), and Empyrion (White). What is interesting to me is that both Subnautica and The Forest came out of Early Access this year as fully released games which is what some in these forums keep stating should be TFP's first and foremost goal for 7 Days to Die. Is finishing what you've got and calling it released really that important?
This last steam chart comparison is between 7 Days to Die (Green), The Long Dark (White), Savage Lands (Blue), and Stranded Deep (Orange). This one shows (I believe) that despite having a great idea it is incredibly hard to deliver a game that becomes successful.
All of these games I chose I think are good comparisons to 7 Days to Die because they released to Early Access and are survival and open world experiences. Interested to hear analysis and see more comparison charts with games that have done better or worse than 7 Days to Die and why you believe that to be the case.
Modding is whats gonna it give this game a long and happy life. Games without it usually die fast and hard. No matter how good the vanilla game is, you can only do the same thing for so long before it gets stale. PVP-centric games excluded of course.
Who said PvP is dead? A lot of people on here dont want a PvP focus because there isnt many really good PvE games out there, while there is a ton of PvP focused games. I googled "PvP dead". First page is about WoW PvP only. Then it goes on with specific games. Electronic Arts said a while ago that SP is dead tough.
I struggle to believe PvP is that popular. Don't get me wrong, it's hard to discuss against those numbers. I just want to talk about my personal experience, what I saw in my small world. If this was data about me and my friends it would still indicate high numbers for Ark yet PvP is quite unpopular between us. It was purely due to the survival appeal and the fact 7 days has zero advertising here. No one knew there was a better option than Ark or Rust. After we got to know 7D we never touched Ark or Rust again. And we always play PvE servers.
I still wonder why they never made a free weekend on steam. Nohting beats every steam user getting a notification. They only rely on streamers. Wich doesnt really work as we can see. But all hail the twitch. (Sadly not only here)
Never forget that there is a bunch of people who dont have good enough internet to even think about watching live streams. (before any wise guy gets the wrong idea, no thats not why i am not very fond
Once they are fully in beta or better yet after they have released the game they have something they can show around to pure "consumer" players. At the moment a free weekend would lead to many players noticing lag spikes and bugs and they would be quitting the game before they even notice any of the qualities of the game.
If anything, this chart clearly points out that games that left early access and ones which kept adding new features and expanding existing ones -in a reasonable time- tend to gather more players over games which update very rarely, do not add a lot of new stuff and just constantly flip over the old stuff.
Early access was great thing at its first year, however due to how much it was exploited by shady devs, nowadays all games with early access tag are being ignored, people got burned multiple times and finally started avoiding them.
All the other titles you mentioned are still in early access, or if released(the forest, subnautica) have a clear ending where you can "beat" the game and see credits for that, meaning while they do offer certain freedom, they aren't full endless sandboxes, people play them, beat them and leave them for another game as there simply isn't any reason to keep playing, especially if the actual content isn't expanded in any meaningful way.
Arc started poorly, but expanded rapidly and kept expanding in good pace while adding massive things to the game with new items, buildings, installations, weapons(personal and static) and so on, while 7d also moved fast at start, pacing slowed to a "once a year" patch, which is tiresome to everyone and completely unacceptable if you want to keep high playerbase.
Hell, look at Minecraft, its hardly a PvP game, kept adding stuff, allowed to make complicated automatic farms and stuff and kept the world interesting with all of that, each update usually adding some cool unique mechanics to play with.
ARK is one of those that I believe used Early Access more for marketing than for an actual alpha stage development model. It was much further along in development when it entered Early Access than what I would call "Alpha". That is also the reason for the difference in update types. 7 Days to Die updates have predominantly been actual development updates where things are being tried and then either kept or discarded. There will come a time once the systems and base structure of the game is in shippable form that they will be able to shift to the types of updates ARK did and what modders are doing now. Much of ARK's early development was done behind closed doors before it was even in the public awareness. Pretty much all of 7 Days to Die's early development has been done in the public awareness and with public participation.
Concurrency isn't much of an issue for 7d and it drops only when we have significant breaks between new content, so it makes perfect sense why population currently is "low" as the game is not only stale currently, but couple that with updates once a year and still being in early access, a lot of players took a break.
True, that 7d is a real alpha if we want to go by the dictionary definition, but that also is the problem for the game and players - while it is moving forward, it moves so slowly people are getting tired of it. No doubt 7d will get to the state you talk about, but the question is how long it'll take to get there and will people still have interest for the game.
I mean, we've been longer then 5 years in development and there isn't even "its ready for release" anywhere on horizon, couple that with already aforementioned updates taking more and more time before they drop to current 1 year+ and while development is going forward, interest in the actual game and hype for it just plummets down.
I do believe that community credit and patience will eventually run out if pimps take too long to deliver and while again, the development cycle is actual alpha, that's also the games biggest problem. Old community just sleeps while waiting for new update and current potential new players avoid games with early access tag like fire.
7DTD is pretty mod friendly once you get past the XML learning curve. A lot of those games are not, and will die shortly after going gold. Counter strike Go, which was an updated version of CS are both HL mods, and are still going strong with 1/2 million daily players because it takes a lot longer time to get old fighting other people.....
Vanilla is also basically the same as it was in A11. Nothing significant has really changed other than the devs have installed a bunch of grindy mechanics to slow down the progression. They think it's fun, and there is an audience for that. I get it, I do. Actually, most of the audience that still exists (and is on this forum) think that's fun. They want to level up their farmer and make a pot of stew in game with ingredients that take hours to farm and collect, and after each level they can make it slightly more nutritious! The other several millions people that bought the game aren't quite as thrilled with that, and have mostly moved on.
Mods and steam workshop support are where this game's community can take foot and thrive. After each Alpha, the modders take a lot of time to write & rewrite their mods, changing/installing new features with newly implemented code changes. I think that is why you hear frequently that players want it done. They want TFP to create a stable game, so they can update their mods and play. When we know TFP are safely "done" for 6 months, then we can actually rent servers @ $100/month, publicize, and plan on playing with friends for a while. In this current development atmosphere, much fewer people are willing to put forth the effort on going through another playthrough when the game could update tomorrow, next week, or maybe 3 months from now. It's a real turn off for most players, that is, unless you're satisfied with a solo/laid back experience.
Mods that support PVP in a mostly fair way or a cooperative, diverse, extensive, challenging PVE gameplay are most important. The trouble is TFP don't really want either of those. They left the game to flounder in a competitive environment for the last several years because they wanted to rework sticks, reskin deer and trees for the 3rd time, add falling debris, gore blocks, and trim the game down to support consoles instead of taking 2 months and giving admins the tools they needed to police their servers, remove exploits and ban hackers. It really killed the game in the primary window of opportunity when it was really trying to grow. Just about every EA game I can think of that was as far along as 7DTD TRIES to care and fix these things to ensure players stay with it. When people that cared posted about it on the forums in A11, A12, A13 - they were met with a very adversarial and dismissive attitude from TFP.
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