LogInMaybe it's better than you think.
If you're worried your game has too few players online on Steam, maybe it's not your fault and it is better than you think. Former Valve developer Chet Faliszek claims that Steam shows online players incorrectly for small games, and this could potentially harm their image.
He said he'd never do Early Access again partly because of that. According to Faliszek, sites like SteamDB don't refresh their data and show outdated information and it looks much worse than it actually is. For example, SteamDB says that his game The Anacrusis had only 1 player online while in reality there were 10,000. "Some cross play sure, but also some just how they get counted for small games," he said on LinkedIn.
Image credit: Stray Bombay
This might not be such a disaster in itself, but Faliszek says there are people who'd see the stats and call it a "dead game," which could turn off some players.
"And the reality of us growing, bringing in more players every day is lost on that, and works against smaller developers trying to use the early access ecosystem for how it was designed and for us working towards our Dec 5th launch."
So Faliszek is planning to ditch the Early Access program for his future projects and use closed betas.
After this post gained some attention, the developer published a video where he talked a bit more about this issue. You can see it on YouTube:
Pavel Djundik, the creator of SteamDB, was quick to defend the platform. He said that the numbers come directly from the Steam API and there is no interpolation, no matter if the game is big or small. "And its concurrent players, not daily players. Same data visible to you on partner site."
He then added that the data for the top 800 games gets updated every 5 minutes, and for the others – every 10 minutes. Based on this, the gap shouldn't be as huge as Faliszek says it is.
We don't know if it's true or not, but low engagement, even perceived only, can definitely impact players' willingness to try a game, especially if it's a multiplayer title like The Anacrusis. At the moment of writing, the game has 1 player online, with a day's peak of 18 players, according to SteamDB.
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