DF Steam player retention

[Endemonadia]

So, looking at the player retention for Dwarf Fortress i have some questions...

https://steamcharts.com/app/975370 (Dwarf Fortress Steam Charts)

Are we at the consistent playerbase or will it continue to drop?

With a launch average playerbase of 14k back in December we now have an average playerbase of 2.3k, thats a very large drop off, and it looks like its still going down. Im sure the devs need some help in understanding why players are not sticking around on Steam. Considering DF has been around for over 10 years and has maintained a healthy core fanbase, why hasnt DF maintained players on Steam?

Everyone who played DF pre-Steam could see there is an amazing game within whatever playable DF we tried. We all knew that once it was finished it would be groundbreaking and once new players tried a polished game they would fall in love with it and the game should grow hand over fist. This hasnt happened....

Is it because the game is still too broken for commercial release?

I appreciate that its normal for every Steam release to have an exaggerated launch player count but it looks to me like DF is dropping off quicker than other Steam games. I will admit its very hard to find a similar comparison, the only real comparison (which we are all sick of hearing) is Rimworld. And that game has more active players now than it had on launch back in 2016. That gives me hope for DF showing that its possible to grow and retain players if u fix the game and improve players game experience. We all hoped DF would have a launch similar to Valheim which hit the ground running as gamers found it and recommended it to others around release. It looks to me like gamers who find DF are not recomending it, are they saying to 'come back later' when its ready?

https://steamcharts.com/app/294100 (Rimworld Steam Charts)

Is DF still way too technical for average players?

Steam players should not be forced to download mods or conduct their own research just to get a game to function. It is 100% the responsibility of the studio to submit a working basegame on Steam. We all know that DF demands a huge amount of research as u explore and open up the game, thats fine, real nerds will embrace this. But, one of the most stressful, painful gamer experiences is for the player to be forced to mess around with technical solutions just to get their game to work properly. Most players will leave before doing this.

I personally believe that we are at the point players who have invested hundreds of hours into a fortress only to have their progress destroyed by a gamebreaking bug are quitting rather than starting a new fortress. It takes a hardened gamer to put a failed game behind them and restart a new one on DF. IMO most Steam gamers drop the game with the intention of returning at a later date and hope the bugs/glitches etc are fixed. Sadly, this will continue as more players hit this arbitrary wall...

I am praying to every Dwarven god that this game becomes the epic game it was always destined to be ;)

[ProRic]

Don't worry, it'll continue for as long as Toady is about - and maybe even beyond. Steam isn't the only income stream. D.F has got some dedicated and wealthy supporters over the years - everyone wants to see this continue.

[Fel]

Dwarf fortress has always been a game where people play for a while then stop for months, come back, stop again, come back and so on.

There are always spikes around the launch of new versions as well.

For many people it's not the game you play non-stop but something you binge on every now and then instead (and it's great at that).

[DoubleG]

I am a keen and eternal DF player. However, atm I'm am doing other stuff. To commit to a DF playthrough is a bit of a time investment. I need to have time available and an idea I want to try out. It would also help when it is less frustrating to play due to missing features. I hate to play when previously I have had an awesome feature that is not present in the best version.

I play when I am inspired to play. I will return.

[Miclee]

I think it'll always have a decent player base(compared to most games that dwindle into low hundreds after a year or two). Major updates will bring a lot of people back, as well, like the adventure mode update(as well, that's likely introduce the game to a whole new realm of players).

I'll note too, I can see why DF isn't a very "streamable" game(Twitch etc.) - most colony sims really aren't fun streams to watch unless you already like the game - but I see that changing come Adventure Mode's release.

[Perenti]

Not sure what the "game breaking bug" is you're talking about. Yeah, there's some slightly annoying bugs, but I haven't met a "game breaking" one yet.

[Jarnis]

Lot of people bought it as a way to pay for a game they played for years already in the past, but may not have time to play right now. I know, I'm one of them.

[AlP]

I play the game without Steam, and many others do as well.

[Strurbury]

I binge the game and purge for a few months. It has always been this way, for me. I am personally very excited about adventure mode, because it was always a bit too obtuse for me to master in the original offering.

[Diarmuhnd]

Way to sober if you can type this much. Drink more and dig some holes.

[MaGicBush]

Originally posted by Diarmuhnd:

Way to sober if you can type this much. Drink more and dig some holes.

The best answer.

[Xaygon]

I put it to rest regularly because of the lack of overview I have. I feel the steam version is still quite inconvenient when I want to know stuff like what animals are roaming throught the map or what things occured.

[Morkonan]

Originally posted by Endemonadia:

So, looking at the player retention for Dwarf Fortress i have some questions...

https://steamcharts.com/app/975370 (Dwarf Fortress Steam Charts)

Are we at the consistent playerbase or will it continue to drop?

Numbers will ebb and flow, but in general they will tend to be drawn down with bursts of activity and higher player counts around "Content Addition" patches and major patch (bugfix/QoL) releases as these will get pushed up to current subscriber and, in general, genre fan's "Front Page" feeds. (Or, other high-profile feeds on Steam.) Plus, if it's in your library, you'll see the patch-release announced at the top of the library feed.

Keep in mind that "Average Players Playing" is not an aggregate number relative to "all players" and does not necessarily reflect how many players actually play the game over other periods of time.

So, 3k online now playing may not be the same 3k players playing tomorrow night. Over the two periods, the accounts that had played DF could actually be 4k players who played at least once, online, during that period. While the snapshots are accurate, some parsing needs to be done to understand what the numbers may really mean. (Bigger sampling periods are more betterer estimates for this purpose.)

Even so, big drops like that aren't "good news," even if a significant drop in player-count should always be expected for any game a good number of weeks/months away from its initial release.

Also - Different games are different... DF requires a lot of sitting, staring, figurin', planning, and problem solving during gameplay. It's not Skyrim... A player can jump into a Skyrim session and slay some beasties and StealthArcher their way through a hole in the ground in thirty-minutes. For DF, it takes thirty minutes just to figure out if you want to make Pots or stay with Wooden Barrels for the next few in-game days. Players likely need to "make time to play DF" and their session-length will likely be longer, requiring either very long bathroom-breaks or the player purposefully dedicating time to play. (ie: Weekend bursting, night play, nobody will jump into it on their lunch hour or in-between or during Zoom meetings, etc...)

Is it because the game is still too broken for commercial release?

For myself, that is the reason.

For others, given that evidence, I would say that is likely one of the issues. But, it may not be the most prominent. (I don't know, 'cause there's no opinion polling available on it.)

Something to keep in mind - There's not a commercial website, no matter how unbiased, that's ever going to say anything negative about this Steam release of DF. Nun.. ain't gonna happen...

While I'm not suggesting such a thing needs to be said/written about, the fact is that nobody is going to put any pressure on the devs/publisher to do anything that could actually affect them to or motivate them to do... something. The fans/players haven't ever been able to affect patching solutions or QoL in Bay12, "IMO," so no such expectation should exist. (As evident by... well, just look at it.) So, only other avenue of possible motivation will simply choose to not respond. IOW - They're completely free to not do anything at all to fix serious issues with no recourse. Take that as you will. (Sounds a bit harsh, but that's just the way it is... Fact, at least IMO here, is just fact.)

I appreciate that its normal for every Steam release to have an exaggerated launch player count but it looks to me like DF is dropping off quicker than other Steam games.

Guess what? :)

The number of threads created that are exactly like yours, questioning the playerbase numbers and existing enthusiasm evidenced by declining play hours, is inversely proportional to the numbers in those automated reports multiplied by the number of days since the game was released... With one caveat - They stop, generally, before a year from the release date has passed. Allowances must be made for occasional threads popping up, posted by enthusiasts. (Additional metrics may apply) :)

Don't worry too much about it, as hardly anyone associated with creating a single-player offline game is very concerned about it... Sales figures generate positive-feedback for developers, not play-hours and concurrent players online long after release. Though, and it's mostly indiy devs, there's nothing wrong with devs/publishers being pleased and rewarded with seeing enthusiastic consumers enjoying themselves. (Plenty of single dev indies out there gush over all the praise and are significantly, positively, impacted by how much their players are enjoying their product.)

Is DF still way too technical for average players?

Not in the least.

However, its depth and the number of variables involved in most gameplay mechanics are far beyond what may be involved in many similar mechanics in other games. It's player interactions as well as, in general, the sorts of decision-trees the player navigates are not too "technical" for most gamers. The UI and bugs, tho... Those are a gameplay minefield that takes some work to get through. (Note: The player must "look" for information in DF that is often made easier to see in other similar games. Also - there's a ton of it. Some is significant, some is not.)

It does have some non-intuitive gameplay mechanics and tasks, though. And, the most glaring difference between DF and the play experience gamers might have in other, similar, games is the impact of behaviors and evolving features/variables (nothing else to call it) that can impact seemingly "simple" actions. (Aside from the effects of worldgen on gameplay, which is something of a very different animal than found in any other game.)

Players being confronted with "I didn't know that could happen in this game" so very many times tends to help grow the mythology of "complex and hard to understand." The game is complex, but not in the sense that it's a "difficult" type of complexity to deal with when playing. There's just a lot of stuffs going on...

...It is 100% the responsibility of the studio to submit a working basegame on Steam. ...

Agreed.

Always.

I love indies, but the decision to become a commercial game developer does not come with a bag of excuses just because they're new, small, etc... That sounds harsh, but numbers don't have hearts.


The game is now in the commercially-released spectrum of computer games and is subject to that environment's standards, such as they are.


Well, let's say some "idealized version of some standards" that are rarely, if ever, actually "enforced" by anyone with any real authority to do so. :)

There are plenty of games that are complete garbage, broken, unplayable using today's OS's, have repeatable catastrophic bugs, etc, that are still being sold on Steam. The only requirement is that something like "game" happens when the "Play" button is pressed if the game is installed on a computer with the game's listed minimum system requirements. That. Is. It. end_of_line All the empowered participants in that process have been successfully served at that point, no take-backsies...

Ideally, though, the consumer expects more. They don't really have unrealistic expectations, either - They want the features promised and want those features working. They want the most egregious and "visible" bugs fixed. (Plenty of games have little-known bugs and features that don't actually "work," but are sufficiently masked/invisible that the player doesn't know or isn't reminded of them very often.)

However - Neither Bay12 or Kitfox are under any obligation to do anything further, ever. They simply aren't. They could disappear tomorrow and nobody could ever do anything at all about that nor would they, even if truly empowered to do so. (Provided none have made any actionable claims that are unfulfilled, that is.)

So... keep this in mind, even with all the stuffs above - IF a developer/publisher fixes/patches/adds something post-release, there are generally three motivations involved -

1) Because they really want to improve the product and make the consumers of it happy. (Or, in some rare cases, the developer is actually doggedly determined to get the thing to do the thing they wanted it to do, regardless if anyone else is happy or not. :))

2) Marketing bumps. (It's just the way the metrics work. New content, big patches, equates to marketing pushbots/algorithms and greater exposure with industry, streamers, guides, 'tubers, etc.) Never underestimate the impact of this sort of thing, especially when you see a game released a few years ago get a big content/patch/DLC update.

3) Reputation is a very distant third place... Honestly, and only IMO, few high-profile devs care and few of the big houses give a crap just as long as their product's release does not make them eligible for legal action, civil or criminal. Indies generally care a good bit because it's all they've got and they want to capture an audience for future use. Even so, it doesn't carry a lot of weight anymore and won't be pursued by many if it comes with a great financial cost. (They'll just give you two sparkly gems worth of free in-game mushroom currency and a free vanity-skin for your pet as compensation for crap-work, so what's the big deal? :))



I am confident we will see some big content and bug-fix patches for DF that will have an impact on "hours played" and "players currently playing" numbers, if but briefly. Gamers are fickle animals.

When that will happen is entirely unknown.

[BaneBlackGuard]

i'm an old DF player and while i don't play very much since this hit steam it shouldn't be interpreted as a negative opinion of the game. DF is one of those games that I binge occasionally and love dearly. I'm hopeful they add the adventure mode to this version, i think that would be awesome. Not all games success should, or even CAN, be measured by the number of concurrent active players. DF is a legendary success, regardless how many players show up on a chart.

[Tanker]

Originally posted by Endemonadia:

Is it because the game is still too broken for commercial release?

Yes.