Game Dead?

[Maximus!]

Where did all the servers go? all thats left is two passworded ones

[ButterdickHetra]

that's a bug, gotta restart the game sometimes. I know I'm still running two dedicated servers that are usually more populated than the officials

[Mooregrimm]

I have all the servers...but they're hella empty all the time. This was like, my favorite game...still is, but it seems to be hard finding other people on. there's always about 2-3 severs with people on...but they're always private and locked, or kick you out right away. Lolz.

I iz good space man.....Where iz all my spacemans...

[VelxraTV]

A few design decisions killed off the playerbase. Yet instead of improving or reverting those changes the devs dug in their heels. Then as the months rolled by more and more people left. Not the first game to die like this.

steam charts
https://i.imgur.com/36rqylu.png

https://steamcharts.com/app/408900#1y

[Eren Jaeger]

Originally posted by Geronimo:

A few design decisions killed off the playerbase. Yet instead of improving or reverting those changes the devs dug in their heels. Then as the months rolled by more and more people left. Not the first game to die like this.

steam charts
https://i.imgur.com/36rqylu.png

https://steamcharts.com/app/408900#1y

Could you elaborate on what these decisions were?

[MADOX-01]

Originally posted by Geronimo:

A few design decisions killed off the playerbase. Yet instead of improving or reverting those changes the devs dug in their heels. Then as the months rolled by more and more people left. Not the first game to die like this.

steam charts
https://i.imgur.com/36rqylu.png

https://steamcharts.com/app/408900#1y

Can you tell what the decisions where?? The game is pretty fun from what i have played. I would like to know how it was before the playerbase abandoned it.

[BIT Bear]

Im going to assume he meant the changes on perks (several times) which bled users, then the tribunal update which took a big hit on the population of the game as well but the community was still quite active after that. However, adding the latest infiltrator or saboteur update I admit the game is definitely dying down to a minimum amount of users playing. I played recently after not playing for several months and was just confused overall on the current game state. Despite Zag's best intentions of adding new elements or features to the game it seems to have the opposite effect on it's playerbase.

[Zag]

Originally posted by BIT Bear:

Im going to assume he meant the changes on perks (several times) which bled users, then the tribunal update which took a big hit on the population of the game as well but the community was still quite active after that.

All of these changes were done before the large bump in players, so that's probably not it. The Traitor update is statistically insignificant since we're talking about a difference of about 100 people concurrent after a long downward tail anyway.

Shrug. If we had a magic button to increase players, we'd press it.

Anyway, there's an active community at discord.gg/NewBlood, if you want to find people to play with.

[Maximus!]

Originally posted by Zag:

Originally posted by BIT Bear:

Im going to assume he meant the changes on perks (several times) which bled users, then the tribunal update which took a big hit on the population of the game as well but the community was still quite active after that.

All of these changes were done before the large bump in players, so that's probably not it. The Traitor update is statistically insignificant since we're talking about a difference of about 100 people concurrent after a long downward tail anyway.

Shrug. If we had a magic button to increase players, we'd press it.

Anyway, there's an active community at discord.gg/NewBlood, if you want to find people to play with.

Just gonna put my two cents in, I feel like the game would benefit greatly from being slightly more immersive by having a slower pace having a smaller chat proximity, there should be a constant dread and one should almost want to avoid another person just as much as they would avoid the creature. Done by removing most see through auras on both sides with the exception of some perks, for the monster the hunt aspect should be drawn out more. It should be more hide and seek in 1 v 1 with the monster easily grabbing lone colonists, the idea being the longer the monster has to search for the hiding colonist the longer he risks being caught by others and group scaenarios the colonists have the advantage obviously but the traitor can help of course

[󠀡󠀡aynhse]

Originally posted by Zag:

Shrug. If we had a magic button to increase players, we'd press it.

if you really want some feedback on why people stopped playing this then I guess i'll give you mine:

originally when I got this product I was expecting it to play something like among us, town of salem, project winter, secret neighbor, and etc. which yes I did get but overtime it got... boring. there was no real longevity to the entertainment it provided if you continuously kept on playing it and many others agreed with me when I last played it in November of last year.

there's also many other things like once you got found out as the monster you're basically screwed and etc but you should have that type of feedback in the negative reviews (which seem to have been trimmed abit when I checked it last year) or through reading negative user reviews on sites like metacritic or whatnot.

welp that's my two cents here.
i'm gonna go back to gaming now

[screamingcrane]

personally I like the game but don`t play it recent just because I never made friends in it and using a mic is not something I can do all the time. I hope for single-player progression to be built closer to the thing or at least better AI. In any case I wish the best for this game.

[ne3zy]

Originally posted by Zag:

All of these changes were done before the large bump in players, so that's probably not it.

The Tribunal update launched at the end of october and split the community in two, a lot of players told you about it for a very long time and what did you do make it worse by adding a debuff.

The graph clearly shows people (new & old players) came to try the update and left after realising it's trash. I'm pretty sure that if that update would have been good the player retention would have been much better.
I personally left because of the tribunal and know 10+ people that did the same as me.

All that to surf on the Among Us wave, and that's just one thing, because the game add many other "minor" issues that added up.
It's incredible that even after a year you still don't realise that update killed your game.

[ne3zy]

this 23 oct 2020 post sums most of the problems https://steamcommunity.com/app/408900/discussions/1/3013431044279985320/

EDIT: quick reminder for Zag, I'm looking at old posts and at the time most players (including me) were complaining about the tribunal stopping the flow of the game and you called that a "meme", looks like it was not so much of a meme after all :)

And the setting to disable it not only came to late but is useless since as far as I know there is not a single server without the tribunal on and hosting yours is impossible due to no one joining, even back in november 2020.

If you search for posts you can see that people were still talking about removing the tribunal in february 2021, almost 5 months after the update, that's how bad people wanted this ♥♥♥♥ out of the game, and you ignored us and listened to the among us 8 years old kids.
I'm mad at this because this was one of my favourite games that you ruined for me.

[Zag]

I'm sorry you feel that way about the game. That breaks my heart. I assure you if I didn't care about this, I wouldn't bother replying. Please read clearly what I'm saying and understand my intent, as this game has consumed most of my awake hours for the last 5 (or maybe 6) years.

First, let's clarify the timeline.

• The Tribunal update came out on October 20th, 2020.
  
• We gave everyone the tools to turn it off on November 30th, 2020.
  
• 1 month passed between allowing the feature to be disabled and its introduction.

Our intention has always been to make a fun game that people enjoy. When you're talking about recovering the population over the span of a year, that requires huge effort from the developers, including marketing effort.

And by effort I don't mean willpower, but money and time to do it. This stuff is enormously time consuming and costly. I am torn typically between internal and external feedback, and many features we work on are a combination of the two.

The Tribunal was a decision decided on internally with our publisher, and was not based on feedback from any Among Us fans at all. We felt we implemented the Tribunal in a way that worked well with the gameplay, but I'm not here to convince you it's a good idea (we already tried that and explained our reasoning behind the system in the original announcement of the feature, and even more in depth in the 1.2.2 Tribunal Tweaks announcement.)

Mandalore's video in November (just before Perkageddon) helped a lot. Keep in mind we didn't pay for that video - he just made it one day out of the blue and we received a large bump in the player base. Large youtuber bumps typically last a short period of time for any game, unless the developers have the marketing (time+budget) to capitalize on it. We definitely didn't. So you get the "long tail," which is what we've been seeing for the last year. This is a very normal trend for games, you can see it in hundreds of indie games every year. The fact Spacemen still has a playerbase of any kind is a miracle given the lack of resources we've had to maintain it as a live service game (which was not our original intent with the game's design anyway.)

My original post in this thread sort of covers my thoughts and feelings on the matter, and you don't need to accept that, but the reality is that player retainment is the number one issue for all free to play or live service games (which again, we've never really intended to make) and it's even more difficult for developers with almost zero marketing budget and when the team size is basically 2 people (myself and an artist.)

Please try to be a little nicer with your feedback, even if you're upset. I'm here trying to do my best, even if it's not good enough for everyone - and it's very hard to please everyone. Even if you feel we ruined the game with design decisions, we still made the game in the first place, and if you enjoyed it for more than a few months, that's more than most developers (and players) can hope for with any games, given the vast library available.

Hope that helps, in some way.

[lurchshanks9]

Originally posted by Zag:

I'm sorry you feel that way about the game. That breaks my heart. I assure you if I didn't care about this, I wouldn't bother replying. Please read clearly what I'm saying and understand my intent, as this game has consumed most of my awake hours for the last 5 (or maybe 6) years.

First, let's clarify the timeline.

• The Tribunal update came out on October 20th, 2020.
  
• We gave everyone the tools to turn it off on November 30th, 2020.
  
• 1 month passed between allowing the feature to be disabled and its introduction.

Our intention has always been to make a fun game that people enjoy. When you're talking about recovering the population over the span of a year, that requires huge effort from the developers, including marketing effort.

And by effort I don't mean willpower, but money and time to do it. This stuff is enormously time consuming and costly. I am torn typically between internal and external feedback, and many features we work on are a combination of the two.

The Tribunal was a decision decided on internally with our publisher, and was not based on feedback from any Among Us fans at all. We felt we implemented the Tribunal in a way that worked well with the gameplay, but I'm not here to convince you it's a good idea (we already tried that and explained our reasoning behind the system in the original announcement of the feature, and even more in depth in the 1.2.2 Tribunal Tweaks announcement.)

Mandalore's video in November (just before Perkageddon) helped a lot. Keep in mind we didn't pay for that video - he just made it one day out of the blue and we received a large bump in the player base. Large youtuber bumps typically last a short period of time for any game, unless the developers have the marketing (time+budget) to capitalize on it. We definitely didn't. So you get the "long tail," which is what we've been seeing for the last year. This is a very normal trend for games, you can see it in hundreds of indie games every year. The fact Spacemen still has a playerbase of any kind is a miracle given the lack of resources we've had to maintain it as a live service game (which was not our original intent with the game's design anyway.)

My original post in this thread sort of covers my thoughts and feelings on the matter, and you don't need to accept that, but the reality is that player retainment is the number one issue for all free to play or live service games (which again, we've never really intended to make) and it's even more difficult for developers with almost zero marketing budget and when the team size is basically 2 people (myself and an artist.)

Please try to be a little nicer with your feedback, even if you're upset. I'm here trying to do my best, even if it's not good enough for everyone - and it's very hard to please everyone. Even if you feel we ruined the game with design decisions, we still made the game in the first place, and if you enjoyed it for more than a few months, that's more than most developers (and players) can hope for with any games, given the vast library available.

Hope that helps, in some way.

honestly mate i love this game

[Gala-vine]

its a great game.. highly underrated.. more of an effort should be to advertise the game more.. its far from dead, invite your friends to play without using steam chat or discord and just use the game voice comms its good fun.