This game is "dead" and here are some "proofs"

[Tensar]

So we will look at the health of the game with some steam stats (like many other did but i'm not different than other people, and so I do my own thread thinking it will be different)

Today was for now the worst day of Sparking Zero with the lowest simultaneous connected players (3318)
https://steamdb.info/app/1790600/charts/#48h
But even more interesting, and perhaps unexpected, we can see that the peak of connected players is in the American time zone. The game was completely abandoned by the Asian player base, which is the player base that spams fighting games and tryhard games the most in general.
FighterZ has exactly the same problem, it is deserted by the Asian community, only survives with Westerners and particularly Americans.
https://steamdb.info/app/678950/charts/#48h

Surprising for anime licenses, we can thanks thoses Davido-kun for not having totally empty games I suppose.

Sparking is not a versus fighting game but some still use this argument to justify the loss of players in the game. However, this is not a valid argument since even a pure VS Fighting game like Tekken 8 is more stable as SparkingZero: https://steamdb.info/app/1778820/charts/#48h
However, the game was released almost a year ago. How do you explain that?
Maybe Sparking is simply not a VS Fighter but a purely fanservice game which apart from its license has nothing going for it?

Being a fighting game is not an argument for being a low pop/deadgame, let's take Naraka Bladepoint as an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlcHCE57VgA
https://youtu.be/x3GiI6k-saM
This game takes a lot of elements from VSfighting (unlike Sparking0) and yet it peaks at 270K every day (Asian time zone)
https://steamdb.info/app/1203220/charts/#48h

All these games are also available on consoles, on cross-platform games (like Naraka) I very rarely see Xbox players so I guess this platform is really depopulated. But proportionally it must be the same everywhere.

So how can we explain that it is mainly Big Jim, Buddy Biscuit, Jelly Belly or americans in general who keep the Dragonball games alive? Without them the games would be completely depopulated since the Asians do not stay on them, preferring games that are much more time-consuming and full tryhard.
That's very strange because I'm sure I saw on other threads people saying the reason players left this game is because it's a fighting game and it need more time to learn the mechanics...
By the way the players' reviews on steam are 90%+ good but only for players with less than 30 hours, the more hours they have the more mixed are the reviews. I suppose they learned the mechanics too much.

Those who find the player base to be normal for a fighting game, do you maintain this position? I just showed two fully PVP fighting games (Sparking has the merit of having a mode... No, of having players who create solo content, and it's very time consuming so it increased the number of online players in game)

We are a month and a few days after its release and the game is producing lower numbers than older games that are even more PvP oriented.

What we can see with these stats is that DB games are mainly played by "casuals" and neglected by tryharders. However the game has no single player content, the only pvp is a "casual" pvp (this is not a negative criticism) which satisfies Westerners (especially Americans).

Today in the current state of the game, the game will not be able to recover for a very long time, there is simply not enough content and even one mode and two maps in free updates will not save the game.
And most people will not buy more DLC for this game if it's still empty, which mean no reason to produce more for the devs.

How this game can be revived?
We are still on the return of one of the most popular licenses and we have catastrophic online players numbers, why?

[Shoebsy]

Originally posted by Tensar:

[The game] only survives with Westerners and particularly Americans.

This might not be true unless we can track console players, PC is already a nearly dead system in Asia, it's really not popular at all, I don't have a PS5, but you'd probably find a lot more of asian playerbase is there. Same issue with anime games in general, You'd have to try pretty hard to find a hard-coded anime game that isn't western specific on PC being played 24/7 pretty constantly.

Originally posted by Tensar:

on cross-platform games (like Naraka) I very rarely see Xbox players so I guess this platform is really depopulated.

-- DBSZ is cross-platform, not cross play. You will not see console players on PC, or Xbox VS Playstation players.

Originally posted by Tensar:

However, [Tekken 8] was released almost a year ago. How do you explain that?

This is pretty easy, Sparking Zero / Budokai / Tekaichi are (as much as fans can't cope with) niche games. It's clear from the sales that dragon ball is pretty big, with Diama and such, it probably helped. That said, Tekken 8 is apart of the professional circuit of fighting games. It also has the depth and skill-gap that the devs worked hard on nailing for every character. It survives after a year because it's circuit of competitive tournaments keep going.

Combine that fighting games aren't popular to start with, and that Tekken 8 is a leading figure of all fighting games, while Dragon ball games like SZ and FighterZ are going to be very niche in comparison. most fighting games without these big names attached to them barely get off the ground to start with.


Also, Tekken and DBSZ are 1vs1 games, You only need 2 people, you can make that work pretty easily with a population of several thousand-per-hour if that population is all online.. Tekken is all online = No problem finding matches (good matches where you're not stomped? eh..) Sparking Zero? = Most players are not doing ranked.

Originally posted by Tensar:

Naraka Bladepoint as an example -- Being a fighting game is not an argument for being a low pop/deadgame, --- This game takes a lot of elements from VSfighting

Okay.. couple huge problems. 1 - Naraka is not a fighting game, It's an action BR game. it barrows nothing from fighting games.. what?

. 2 - It's free-to-play, and it's effectively China's Fortnite since they're closing down fortnite anyway in china. It being F2P is already going to naturally attact attention, secondly it's in every chinese game cafe. and it's popular to start with. It's got *LOTS* of Alt acounts for a dozen or more people per day. So between that influence and the fact Naraka is 'the' video game in china for the most. Yeah, this makes sense anyways. This is an exception, not the rule.

Originally posted by Tensar:

By the way the players' reviews on steam are 90%+ good but only for players with less than 30 hours, the more hours they have the more mixed are the reviews. I suppose they learned the mechanics too much.

This idea that you must spend XX-digits or XXX-digits on a game is silly, also, I don't think you're even right? It look slike a lot of big reviews are 25+ Lots are 40+.. This idea is silly because a game's enjoyment to someone isn't dependent on matching your idea of how much time they've put in. This is clearly not a competitive fighting game. no one marketed it as such. It's wild to me that so many complaints here are about it not being competitive-viable enough. If you expected that out of DBSZ than I do hope you find a better game. Maybe keep your hype down next time.

People can play and enjoy their games without putting 10-20-40-1000s' of hours into it. A review isn't there to judge if YOU find the time investment or not.

Also most games' reviews are below 30 hours so what's even this bar about..

Originally posted by Tensar:

Those who find the player base to be normal for a fighting game, do you maintain this position?

It is very normal to see a big drop in players, 60-80% after a month of the game's release, (without mentioning Early Access) as long as a game doesn't require 30-50 or even 100 players, this isn't a problem. DBSZ only needs 2 players in a match, and with what i'd guess is 1000-ish people actively playing and looking for online matches at a time. It's still very possible to find matches.

but the quick drop of the first 2 weeks shows that Sparking Zero isn't a game made to last. That's totally fine. some games are just games that release, are fun to play for a bit, and you move on. It does suck for players like me who enjoy competitive battles though.. but for some reason, it seems a lot of steam Gamers think DBSZ was going to be a competitive game.. it is not and will never be.

[Shoebsy]

Originally posted by Tensar:

This game is "dead"

It is not, you can still find matches in matchmaking, It does suck that it's not that well implemented. the players being split between DP battles and single battles... and than lobbies VS ranked.. I honestly believe that was as mistake, Lobbies should be considered private games for invites, and ranked should be match-making, with the option to go for any rules to play with (Tournament, DP, singles)

I'm sure the game won't survive a full month, and it will be much harder to find games as it goes on, The DLC will definately draw in players though, Put my feet to fire here, when the DLC comes out, you'll see a decently big spike. and than another big drop off in a week or so.

Games are not "Dead" until they are not playable. Sparking Zero competitive sucks because the game was not made for an in-depth fighter which it's trying to bridge between a fighting game and an arena-fighter. They did good, The game is pretty enjoyable casually, But the competitive scene killed itself. The path-of-least-resistance to winning was meta and cheese. the first 2 weeks were amazing and I *LOVED* every fight I had, every one agreed. but between the poor handling of mechanics and the amount of exploits, it killed the chances for a comprehensive competitive game with meta and cheese.


The community got its fill, and it's clear from the reviews that the mutliplayer wasn't their focus. You can say "Theres no single player content" but you're just hard to please with that anyways.

TLDR: Games not dead (yet) but I wouldn't give it a lifespan of much longer. That's okay. some games are just made to be played for a couple weeks and than moved on from. Not every game needs to be a insanely huge 60K players a day hype train. Does paying 80USD suck for that fact? Yup.

[Velber]

lol another doomsayer thread, when will people get tired to doing these on random games?
#thanksforthefreepoints

[Bulbasaur]

personally while i dont agree with everything the OP suggests, i do believe the game is on a terrible road..... its laready 3k lows now, we still have 2-3 weeks for a patch to hit. This PATCH could still be highly disappointing, and wont address core issues such as rage quitting, communication errors, and save file corruption.

If you rip the DBZ paint off this game you know the game would have maybe 1-4k players right now. When does the player base stabilize? All fighting games have found stable populations, but SZ continuously goes down.

People who want to say it sold the most, it made the most money...... sure but then your also saying that the game selling the most copies also died the fastest by how many players left the game from day 1.

Either way theres tons of people complaining about finding qeues, and when they can't play more people leave. Theres regions in this game that disable certain players from playing if the ping exceeds 150+. They just simply wont see any lobbies.

Compare this game to fighting games, low budget games, any game really and theres games by definition that should be way less than SZ right now and they are doing well (phasmophobia, half life 2, 7 days to die, yugioh master duel, A FISHING GAME has more players than SZ on pc right now, lethal company, killing floor 2, sf6, tekken, cookie clicker, geometry dash.

I have given you many examples of games doing better than SZ on the pc right now........ and many of these games should not be touching the budget of sparking zeros dev time IN THEORY.

Sticking up for the game is pure copium and i dont know how you can disagree.

[Tensar]

Originally posted by Shoebsy:

Originally posted by Tensar:

[The game] only survives with Westerners and particularly Americans.

This might not be true unless we can track console players, PC is already a nearly dead system in Asia, it's really not popular at all, I don't have a PS5, but you'd probably find a lot more of asian playerbase is there. Same issue with anime games in general, You'd have to try pretty hard to find a hard-coded anime game that isn't western specific on PC being played 24/7 pretty constantly.

Originally posted by Tensar:

on cross-platform games (like Naraka) I very rarely see Xbox players so I guess this platform is really depopulated.

-- DBSZ is cross-platform, not cross play. You will not see console players on PC, or Xbox VS Playstation players.

Originally posted by Tensar:

However, [Tekken 8] was released almost a year ago. How do you explain that?

This is pretty easy, Sparking Zero / Budokai / Tekaichi are (as much as fans can't cope with) niche games. It's clear from the sales that dragon ball is pretty big, with Diama and such, it probably helped. That said, Tekken 8 is apart of the professional circuit of fighting games. It also has the depth and skill-gap that the devs worked hard on nailing for every character. It survives after a year because it's circuit of competitive tournaments keep going.

Combine that fighting games aren't popular to start with, and that Tekken 8 is a leading figure of all fighting games, while Dragon ball games like SZ and FighterZ are going to be very niche in comparison. most fighting games without these big names attached to them barely get off the ground to start with.


Also, Tekken and DBSZ are 1vs1 games, You only need 2 people, you can make that work pretty easily with a population of several thousand-per-hour if that population is all online.. Tekken is all online = No problem finding matches (good matches where you're not stomped? eh..) Sparking Zero? = Most players are not doing ranked.

Originally posted by Tensar:

Naraka Bladepoint as an example -- Being a fighting game is not an argument for being a low pop/deadgame, --- This game takes a lot of elements from VSfighting

Okay.. couple huge problems. 1 - Naraka is not a fighting game, It's an action BR game. it barrows nothing from fighting games.. what?

. 2 - It's free-to-play, and it's effectively China's Fortnite since they're closing down fortnite anyway in china. It being F2P is already going to naturally attact attention, secondly it's in every chinese game cafe. and it's popular to start with. It's got *LOTS* of Alt acounts for a dozen or more people per day. So between that influence and the fact Naraka is 'the' video game in china for the most. Yeah, this makes sense anyways. This is an exception, not the rule.

Originally posted by Tensar:

By the way the players' reviews on steam are 90%+ good but only for players with less than 30 hours, the more hours they have the more mixed are the reviews. I suppose they learned the mechanics too much.

This idea that you must spend XX-digits or XXX-digits on a game is silly, also, I don't think you're even right? It look slike a lot of big reviews are 25+ Lots are 40+.. This idea is silly because a game's enjoyment to someone isn't dependent on matching your idea of how much time they've put in. This is clearly not a competitive fighting game. no one marketed it as such. It's wild to me that so many complaints here are about it not being competitive-viable enough. If you expected that out of DBSZ than I do hope you find a better game. Maybe keep your hype down next time.

People can play and enjoy their games without putting 10-20-40-1000s' of hours into it. A review isn't there to judge if YOU find the time investment or not.

Also most games' reviews are below 30 hours so what's even this bar about..

Originally posted by Tensar:

Those who find the player base to be normal for a fighting game, do you maintain this position?

It is very normal to see a big drop in players, 60-80% after a month of the game's release, (without mentioning Early Access) as long as a game doesn't require 30-50 or even 100 players, this isn't a problem. DBSZ only needs 2 players in a match, and with what i'd guess is 1000-ish people actively playing and looking for online matches at a time. It's still very possible to find matches.

but the quick drop of the first 2 weeks shows that Sparking Zero isn't a game made to last. That's totally fine. some games are just games that release, are fun to play for a bit, and you move on. It does suck for players like me who enjoy competitive battles though.. but for some reason, it seems a lot of steam Gamers think DBSZ was going to be a competitive game.. it is not and will never be.

PC is not dead in Asia, on much time consuming games you will see mostly asians play it.
And like I said today Naraka got 270K players every days, when the game was Buy2Play it was 150K every days. (You can verify on steamcharts)

When I talk about the less they have playtime the more they put nice reviews it's just to show that the reviews rating mean nothing, all my post is an answer to people who defend the game in its actual state. People who dived more into the game generally put mixed reviews.

Naraka combats is based on fighting games, if you justify the drop of players on Sparking because it's a fighting game (it's not a real fighting game IMO) then you can count naraka being one, the gameplay is much more based on versus fighting games.

And I am not expecting Sparking to be a competitive game, I prefere it to be more solo content oriented. I just see on this forum some people saying people leave the game because it's a fighting game difficult to master. But they don't understand it's a casual game without competitive. So how a casual game can have worse numbers than PvP competitives fighting games like Tekken?

The main problem of this game and why the number of players dropped so fast is because it's empty and not finished. With more gamemodes it wouldn't die so fast.

[Tensar]

Again today was the day with the lowest number of players... But the game is in good health

[Wushiba]

Originally posted by Tensar:

This game is "dead" and here are some "proofs"

Originally posted by Tensar:

Again today was the day with the lowest number of players... But the game is in good health :winter2019happysnowman:

There's a big difference between "not in a good health" and "dead".

[Velber]

Originally posted by Wushiba:

Originally posted by Tensar:

This game is "dead" and here are some "proofs"

Originally posted by Tensar:

Again today was the day with the lowest number of players... But the game is in good health :winter2019happysnowman:

There's a big difference between "not in a good health" and "dead".

lol

[Ronin]

Broly/UI Goku/Fusion cheese spam mains basically made the majority of Ranked players want to no longer play.

Reminder - if literally nobody wants to rematch you then you're probably not a fun opponent and should rethink your fighting style and try to bring honour to your name, instead of shame!

[Shoebsy]

Originally posted by Ronin:

should rethink your fighting style and try to bring honour to your name, instead of shame!

You gotta calm down bro, It's a cheesy dragon ball game, not your mom's reputation at school.

[Gigachad]

Originally posted by Shoebsy:

Originally posted by Ronin:

should rethink your fighting style and try to bring honour to your name, instead of shame!

You gotta calm down bro, It's a cheesy dragon ball game, not your mom's reputation at school.

cope harder, doing that ♥♥♥♥ in any game is despiciable and it is very likely you couldn't be trusted as a person through all sections of life

Anyway the OP is completely right and anybody disagreeing is one of these roshi videl broly bardok lamers that will soon only have each other to rage quit on

[skill issue]

if a game has awful online, eventually it will only be people that are playing the single player, and you cant play single player forever... you dont realise how complete garbage the entire online system is in this game, never seen something so bad in a 1vs1 game

[Tensar]

Originally posted by skill issue:

if a game has awful online, eventually it will only be people that are playing the single player, and you cant play single player forever... you dont realise how complete garbage the entire online system is in this game, never seen something so bad in a 1vs1 game

But the single player content is inexistant

[Bulbasaur]

Originally posted by skill issue:

if a game has awful online, eventually it will only be people that are playing the single player, and you cant play single player forever... you dont realise how complete garbage the entire online system is in this game, never seen something so bad in a 1vs1 game

I agree with with what your saying, but many players could not even experience online play as their product did not work as intended and bandai is blaming the players for it. Bandai and anime games are full scams, if your unlucky and have a non working game, you might aswell return it asap because they are not going to help you.

[Shoebsy]

Originally posted by Gigachad:

Originally posted by Shoebsy:

You gotta calm down bro, It's a cheesy dragon ball game, not your mom's reputation at school.

cope harder, doing that ♥♥♥♥ in any game is despiciable and it is very likely you couldn't be trusted as a person through all sections of life

Anyway the OP is completely right and anybody disagreeing is one of these roshi videl broly bardok lamers that will soon only have each other to rage quit on

Didn't disagree, You should read more than 15 words at once. Challenge yourself. grow stronger.