Review vs player count

[Benspartan]

Not trying to attract trolls, more looking for thoughtful reasoning.

I'm quite puzzled by the discrepancy between steam reviews and player numbers on steamdb.
A 95-97% is insanely hard to achieve, and yet it topped at 1800 concurrent players at release and is now cruising ~500 players. What gives ? Unkown dev/failed marketing, saturated market?

[The Renderer]

Your reasoning is flawed, there is no relation between reviews/ratings and player numbers.
Edit: Much less concurrent players, that doesn't mean anything at all.

[Benspartan]

There's no direct relation granted.
But if the reviews are so outstanding why isn't played more?
Looking at a concurrent player graph on a longer time gives a good idea of how much it is being played and its retention over time.

[The Renderer]

I don't know, but maybe it's a game/genre that not that many people are interested in (turn based etc) but those that do like it a lot?
If you are asking these questions because you are interested in playing it yourself, maybe ask more about the things that are important to you, not about statistics. And if you're just curious about the stats, well, I doubt anyone can do more than speculate.

[Haohmaru]

Not everyone can enjoy Balatro level success… the game is excellent but it definitely falls into a somewhat niche and over saturated genre, even though the game itself is quite unique and definitely sets itself apart from anything else I’ve ever played.

[Mustardoish]

I do believe the market it quite saturated, with Hades 2 and Balatro around at the same time. Doesn't mean it cannot be a long term slow burner.

[Thomas Goblinz]

Hey there! Wanted to give an opinion, and even though I'm part of the Publisher team, I'm not entering chat with the answer but wanted to take part to the discussion :D

I pretty much agree with a lot of different things that have been said above :
Market is pretty much saturated is an explanation, type of game being a bit niche, and also what I'd call the "pitch it to a friend".
In my opinion Shogun Showdown is a game that truly reveals itself when you're playing it, making it hard to pitch it to a friend/someone playing games kind of casually. Balatro, for exemple, has the "Poker Roguelike" line. Two words, and it's already drawing attention. Shogun Showdown has a bit less of that, making the spreading of the word (outside of our own marketting) a bit hard to really "explode" and go beyond our target audience. And Steam having tons of new games everyday, it's hard even to exist on the platform. As a reminder, predictions this year are ~17000 games released in 2024 vs 14347 in 2023. If predictions are right, it means there's an average of almost 47 games coming out everyday on Steam. So even if you ask someone that do play a lot of games, included indie games, how many different game they played/wanted to try in a year, you'll be far from 17000 :D. IN fact, even if you play a different game every day, you'll have tested approx 2% of the games that came out in a year
Of course this also includes all kind of games, including free to play ones that for some of them don't especially have the same means/objectives, but this still kind of gives an idea on how hard it is to even make your way into people's library

That being said, having a game with that much reviews in "Overwhelmingly positive" is really something we're proud of, regardless of the concurrent player stats that, even if great to check, does not mean that much itself.
I'm surprised at how many reviews are still coming through on Shogun Showdown (kind of connecting to your point Mustardoish about the game doing great over time). Because they keep coming, and it really does feel special to me as I (and we, at Goblinz) LOVED working with Roboatino, the dev. This guy's beyond nice and is truly talented, and I do hope more people will discover this game

[ricky1981]

One of my favourite games of the year, aside from some of the challenges being a bit too hard I felt it was nigh on perfect. I'd have loved a bit more content in terms of variety of regions, but that's a nitpick.

I think it's just not a style of game that's as immediately obvious/approachable as something like Balatro (even though it's a better game imo).

[vgp]

Are this so bad numbers ? 500 players is not that bad for this type of indie game.

Writing this message, I compare the number of players with similar indie games, I mean objectively good indie games quite recent. Showgun showdown has more players right now than games like wildfrost, cobalt core, tactical breach wizard (nominated in different prize) or even steamworld heist 2 which has ggot a strong franchise.
And quite same number as backpack hero or thronefall.

I don't know if the devs are disapointed by sales but that looks quite decent compared to other games. You can't compare to balatro which is the trend of the year.
And to be honest, I played 140h of balatro, I really like Showgun showdown for now but I can't see me play this game more than 20 hours ( I may be wrong ) which would be already great.

If I may add something to explain maybe why the game is not really known. I think the name of the game is a bit too generic and the visuals maybe a little too even they are very good ( also a bit similar with another game namde racine)

[Thomas Goblinz]

Originally posted by vgp:

Are this so bad numbers ? 500 players is not that bad for this type of indie game.

Writing this message, I compare the number of players with similar indie games, I mean objectively good indie games quite recent. Showgun showdown has more players right now than games like wildfrost, cobalt core, tactical breach wizard (nominated in different prize) or even steamworld heist 2 which has ggot a strong franchise.
And quite same number as backpack hero or thronefall.

I don't know if the devs are disapointed by sales but that looks quite decent compared to other games. You can't compare to balatro which is the trend of the year.
And to be honest, I played 140h of balatro, I really like Showgun showdown for now but I can't see me play this game more than 20 hours ( I may be wrong ) which would be already great.

If I may add something to explain maybe why the game is not really known. I think the name of the game is a bit too generic and the visuals maybe a little too even they are very good ( also a bit similar with another game namde racine)

Oh no sorry I should have make it clear from the beginning, we're not disappointed by the sales at all!
It was more a general answer to "Why isn't Shogun a hit nominated to game awards like Balatro?", and while as you said it is not really comparable to Balatro, it's still great to have a kind of general reflexion on what I understood as the question of the OP "Why Balatro is the trend of the year and not Shogun Showdown, since it has Overwhelmingly positive reviews and a great review count?"
And I think it's a question with no straight answer, but everything that's been said in this thread (including your valuable opinion) is part of the answer. But we do not expect our games to be Balatro-like hits in term of sales because that would be a sloppy business plan, but we're trying to give our games the maximum chances to become one!

We're definitely very happy with Shogun Showdown, both in term of game quality and in terms of sales