Feels like game's playerbase is underperforming

[Fast.n.painful]

I'm not a hater or anything, I wish nothing, but the best for the game and developers. But doesn't it feel underwhelming, that FREE game, that is litteraly a tactical shooter everyone wanted, has no players? I mean, 300 players is not enough for a free game. And this project moved from 1600 peak playerbase to 400 in a year.

I know this is alpha and still in development. But I think even at this state OHD should have at least 1000 players a day at minimum. Just an opinion. Maybe project needs more promotion from big YT chanels or more ads?

[Lil B_999]

Originally posted by Fast.n.painful:

I'm not a hater or anything, I wish nothing, but the best for the game and developers. But doesn't it feel underwhelming, that FREE game, that is litteraly a tactical shooter everyone wanted, has no players? I mean, 300 players is not enough for a free game. And this project moved from 1600 peak playerbase to 400 in a year.

I know this is alpha and still in development. But I think even at this state OHD should have at least 1000 players a day at minimum. Just an opinion. Maybe project needs more promotion from big YT chanels or more ads?

Maybe

[Kaleidescoop]

I think it still needs a lot of work before they can start advertising it more heavily, otherwise we're going to get a repeat of the initial launch on Steam.

[Lil B_999]

Just be patient and soon the game would be good.

[Goomes]

Originally posted by Fast.n.painful:

I'm not a hater or anything, I wish nothing, but the best for the game and developers. But doesn't it feel underwhelming, that FREE game, that is litteraly a tactical shooter everyone wanted, has no players? I mean, 300 players is not enough for a free game. And this project moved from 1600 peak playerbase to 400 in a year.

I know this is alpha and still in development. But I think even at this state OHD should have at least 1000 players a day at minimum. Just an opinion. Maybe project needs more promotion from big YT chanels or more ads?

We don't do any promotion right now besides on Bluedrake's channel (the owner) and our own internal platforms (O:HD accounts) because we don't feel like the game is really ready for anything beyond that yet. Any coverage that happens outside of that is completely organic. In our eyes, if we had tried to do the typical mega hype launch stuff that many other games tend to do to get as many people in the door at launch as possible, it would have likely had the inverse effect and also provided us with a lot of really bad info (and we can see so much evidence of this being the case in other games too, so tbh I personally never really understood the desire for us to be doing this at this stage because it just seems like the super obvious wrong move in general, at least if the goal is to have a game focused on the long term and not just short term sales to get as much money up front as possible and then move on to the next project).

Getting it out and released this early on was part of our process—we want to get the small initial crowds in early, collect feedback, bug reports, test out ideas, find the major pain points, and so on, and then make updates and changes that just objectively make things better over time. We feel that if we do that, and the game and framework are objectively good, all of that stuff will come naturally and organically over time because people want to play actual good games, not just well marketed games (and there are plenty of examples of games that have been out for years that have had surges of players down the road as they have improved the game over time). As such, our focus on player count is quite minimal right now, and not really super important to us because we are more concerned with the long term future of the project, and not the short term immediate player count and whether or not we are a hype game. We have enough people playing the game, testing, giving us feedback, making mods and testing the SDK/mod tools, and so on for us to be getting what we need at the moment, and there will be a day where we can look at everything and determine that it's actually ready for a significant marketing push like that because we know we can support it.

Side note: one other technical aspect of this that is not often mentioned is Steam Workshop and the fact we also could not actually open this up until we went live, and that was an important one for us to get out there and make sure everything is working properly not only just for mod makers, but also so we can build systems like the auto mod downloading that was just introduced in this latest patch.

[Fast.n.painful]

Got it. I'm far from game development, but close to marketing, that's why it's interesting to see a free project with low playerbase (well, low for now). Hope this game will be the next big thing in the industry

[Fast.n.painful]

Originally posted by Lil B_999:

Just be patient and soon the game would be good.

well, I'm not saying that it's bad, I enjoy it. There are some problems here and there, but nothing I can't handle