It's a shame that the Line War community....

[omegacon4]

spends less time in the Steam forums and more time in the LW discord.

Many prospective customers / gamers check out the activity in a game's "Discussions" forum before buying. They want to see if the game is dead or not (or if the dev has exit scammed by not posting anything over a period of time).

Based on this discussion forum's activity, many will think this game is dead. Having only 100 players playing the game on Steam concurrently doesn't help either.

[valithor]

Really depends on what you consider "dead". For many peoples definitions they'd be correct to assume it's dead.

[gucciboy]

for an already niche game play genre of RTS, this numbers are low enough to be considered dead. They need to start marketing this great game, youtube ads, get a twitch streamer to make content etc

[omegacon4]

There are so many gameplay videos from 1 year ago. What happened since then? Did those streamers stop getting paychecks from the dev?

[valithor]

Originally posted by omegacon4:

There are so many gameplay videos from 1 year ago. What happened since then? Did those streamers stop getting paychecks from the dev?

Dev pays for ads around once per year. There is usually a player spike up to 70-130 active players online and it slowly decays back to 10-20 online over the next few months. You can assume any large Youtuber who made a one off video was paid to do it. As far as I know any of the smaller Youtubers with under 5k subs make videos because they enjoy the game not because they were paid to do it.

If my memory is correct many of these smaller Youtubers stopped making videos when the dev released a half-assed replay UI change. He didn't listen to what they needed, so gave them something completely useless. All he'd need to do to make it what they wanted was change a couple of the numbers... but that's probably never going to happen. I think I've seen a single Youtube video using the new UI feature, and that same Youtuber hasn't used it since.

Until he makes major modifications to the game any ads just will not help long term player count wise because:

• The game has terrible player retention.
  
• It shows terribly on Youtube. Because of this his ads rely on showing things that literally never happen in games. It's borderline false advertising when he does do it. Which also leads to poor player retention...
  
• Development is painfully slow. Assume anything on any roadmap is 2+ years away. Also assume the roadmap will change.
  
  • https://www.linewar.com/Home/Game#roadmap
    
  • https://web.archive.org/web/20221205003225/https://www.linewar.com/Home/Game#roadmap
• To a lesser extent the dev is completely absent from his own community. (It's only by saying thing like this that you may get him to respond. He claims to read every message, but I highly doubt that is true.)

Significant strides could be made with just a couple of small QoL changes. Some of these changes could be done in less than an hour of effort. But... his boast of this being a game with "~8 person-years" of effort into it... To me also means nothing is going to happen quickly.

[omegacon4]

Thanks for the info. The dev is better off saving his money than paying the big YouTubers. Everyone with a brain knows those YouTubers are no better than ♥♥♥♥♥♥ when it comes to being paid to do something. Game reviewers used to have integrity back when they did so as a hobby, not as a "job". Same goes for streamers.

[Jules]

You know there is like just one main developer on this game right. And the price point is around $20, and people are complaining for what is a new unique RTS. Marketing costs a lot of dosh, especially for a sole Indie developer. I consider it pretty awesome achievement.

[valithor]

Originally posted by Jules:

You know there is like just one main developer on this game right. And the price point is around $20, and people are complaining for what is a new unique RTS. Marketing costs a lot of dosh, especially for a sole Indie developer. I consider it pretty awesome achievement.

You are completely correct. The game is amazing for what it is, and any Indie game that makes it to release is an amazing accomplishment. My only goal was to let people know what to expect by being completely objective.

No one should purchase it for what it can be. The developer has shown he over promises and under delivers. That shouldn't detract from what is already out there though. If people think they'll like what is already done then they should definitely buy it. I just see no point in lying to people that it being an amazing accomplishment means it is immune to criticism.

[cerberus]

I completely agree. The game needs its own global chat feature so there can be an on platform community. Using discord turns it into a glorified tabletop simulator.

[Medicus]

Originally posted by valithor:

Really depends on what you consider "dead". For many peoples definitions they'd be correct to assume it's dead.

I think the communications could be a bit more frequently to make it appear less dead. I trust the developer but new customers dont know him.

For the playerbase, it certainly appears dead for multiplayer from the outside.

[Imphenzia]

Ideally, we should spend much more time in here and communicate but as indiedevs we tend to focus more on "what we do" in our comfort zone as developers =)

No matter what we do, there will always be opinions. If we don't pay influencers, that's what we should be doing. If we do pay influencers, we should be saving our money instead. If we add teams, we should have added single-player instead, if we added single-player we should have made the game free-to-play instead.

We're doing our best to continue to develop and promote Line War and in three years since the release it has come a long way adding teams, carriers, tech, single-player, and now trains and believe it or not - percentage-wise the player curve looks pretty decent compared to many other games released 3 years ago.

There are so many games available out there for people to buy and play, so I understand the concern people have. I hope that the single-player mode, continued development, and continued support from our dedicated players can still encourage people to give Line War a go if you have these concerns =)

[valithor]

Originally posted by Imphenzia:

No matter what we do, there will always be opinions.

Very nice to see some sort of developer feedback. Considering you run a massive discord server on top of developing your own game the work you do over here is impressive. LW would not be the game it is today without you.

Sorry just had to share an opinion :)