Why ppl stop playing ?

[πｮmrυﾔ]

it was around 15k or closed to 20k but now 6-7 ? hope this wont effect roadmap and update progress/development of game

[Ravenous Demon]

it wont

[RadCon One]

2 reasons most likely:

1) we can see that players begin to drop off as the streaming of the game drops off: https://steamdb.info/app/975370/charts/ correlation may not be causation here, but it is something to thing about. I also think a lot of it is people seeing the game and thinking it looks awesome after watching someone else play, but then finding it difficult to play/proceed on their own and so dropping it.

2) (and this one is more of a guess as I didn't play the original version) This version of the game isn't yet up to date with the original version and is missing a lot of features, so many of the long time veterans are probably still on it until this one gets updated. Likely kind of like how skyrim SE was dead for a bit compared to oldrim for many of the verteran players before the modding community caught back up to it some time later since they didn't want to give up the features they came to know and love.

Also, it seems to be peaking at about 10k concurrent players a day recently which isn't terrible by any means. AoE2 "only" has about 2x as many players online a day and has also been around for 2+ decades like dwarf fortress (a bit longer actually), and so there is definitely precedent for continuing a game over the long term even if it isn't a game that nets 100,000s a day.

[High Lord Denix]

Originally posted by n3mrut:

hope this wont effect roadmap and update progress/development of game

You can really tell when someones new huh lol, this game is 20 years in the making, its a passion project, there could be literally nobody playing it and it wouldnt effect development of the game.

As for why people stopped playing its the same reason for any new release, the hype died down and people move on to the next thing, no game hits a resting point at its peak players.

[RadCon One]

Another thing to think of based on the same site it the number of people that have bought the game. Based on steam reviews there is a low estimate of 350,000 people having bought the game. Lets be really pessimistic though and say only 100,000 did. At $30 USD for the game that is still $3,000,000. My understanding is that before they moved to steam they were only a 2 man team, and that amount of money could feed a small team (they did make an announcement about getting a bigger team, but still, I doubt it is massive) for quite some time, and they did this for free before (not including nay donations).

[True Guesser, Wand Bearer, etc.]

I am firmly in the second category. For anyone who played Classic, the Premium UI is slower and lacking details. Muscle memory aside, a lot of things were lost in transition. That said, ease of managing mods is far superior in Premium.

[Dervish]

Who cares what other people do?

Its not a MP game where it matters how many people are online and playing

[RadCon One]

Originally posted by True Guesser, Wand Bearer, etc.:

I am firmly in the second category. For anyone who played Classic, the Premium UI is slower and lacking details. Muscle memory aside, a lot of things were lost in transition. That said, ease of managing mods is far superior in Premium.

I feel that. Like I said, I didn't play the classic version of this... but that Skyrim example I used? Yeah, I was partially talking about myself there.

New graphics are always welcome, but it is hard for me to trade to a less feature filled version of a game for that alone. I eventually migrated over to SE when a number of my core mods were updated and I just really wanted to break free of the old edition's aging 32 bit engine that was causing crashes.

I see this heading in the same direction. Looking at the dwarf fortress Reddit it is clear that many are still using the classic version too as I see them mentioning things I can't do yet.

[VoiD]

It's normal, every launch has a high peak, then it drops to less than half within the first month, and it doesn't stop there.

Usually, most games end up kinda dead after half a year+, games like this probably will never die and sometimes start to, slowly, gain new players over time reaching higher average numbers every year, it happened with some total war games, some paradox games, rimworld, etc...

Don't know if the numbers will actually increase for DF, but at least I know some people have been playing for many years and there's no reason for them to just stop now.

As for the question itself, if I were to guess I'd say most people just got tired as they've already seen all/most of the content of the game by now and, most important, the game doesn't do the players any favors, the UI and menus are horrible, and dealing with a constant landslide of massive gamebreaking bugs every hour can be a huge turn off for most people, most games that get ♥♥♥♥ from their playerbase for coming out too early, being too unpolished or having far too many bugs/issues to be considered playable, like Imperator, WH3 and Victoria 3 don't have even a tenth of a fraction of the number, and severity, of the bugs & issues found in DF, even though the forums are full of people asking for help on how to deal with several bugs, I'm honestly surprised there aren't a lot more threads about those issues.

In terms of quality, features, menus, UI, and bugs, I don't think I've ever seen a game launch this bad other than maybe Rome 2.

[Lucidess]

It's night time across North America.
Bruh, people have lives to live, and sleep must be slept.

[Dead]

I don't see this as much of an issue really, Dwarf Fortress isn't the only game people are playing you know, once people had reached a certain "thing" when they're gaming, they would find something else to play, of course some would go back and some don't.

Just like any other game would anyway.
Besides, there's also an important factor where people have lives.

[Dynamite]

It goes the other way around.

The game was a sound success and there's proof that people want to play Dwarf Fortress. From those who stopped playing, many can be recalled back again through new patches - mainly bugfixes, QoL and features.

If anything, a not-so-severe drop in players motivates more development, the potential is there and the game is far from dead. You need to see the difference between a 50% drop from 20K to 10K and a drop from 2K to 1K - drops like these are always to be expected, but the 10K playerbase is way healthier than the 1K one. The initial success means a lot.

Also, the dev has made clear that he released the Steam version "unfinished" just to be able to gather funds already. He did so and quite succesfully; which means that we can expect for him to finish porting the game to Steam as promised - and probably more.

[suejak]

This happens with almost literally every game, especially singleplayer games. Every game has a ton of players at release and then it goes down. Only so many people and yet there are a ton of games to play out there.

[Perenti]

I've played this game on-and-off for about 10 years. I binge, and put it aside for a year, by which time it can surprise me again, so I play again. How many of those "missing" players will play it in the next month? or year? I would expect a significant proportion. I don't think that "normal people" play a game 20 hours a day and 29 days per month either...

[Lamp]

For me it's because of the jank. Just spent almost three hours trying to dam one block of an underground river. Nearly had it in the first minute/the first time around, but the area I need to wall up refills out of nowhere. Proceeded to attempt about a dozen more times to get my dwarves to build the wall in time (they have the ingame equivalent of like a day and the material is 3 spaces away.) and just couldnt get close.

Building is just such a low priority and there's no way to say "Do this extremely important thing right now." I even made a burrow around the area so dozens of dwarves were on hand and excluded all other labor besides building- the priorities are just useless. They just loiter around and by the time one of them goes for the wall that needs building it's been a day and the pumped area is magically filling up again faster than a team of pumps can drain it.

The reason this dam needs to happen is because an underground river is flowing into another underground chamber that has drainage, so both map's water is going crazy and slowing the game to a crawl. Takes hours for a season to pass. I love this game, but I'm so done with this ♥♥♥♥.

[pezenwever]

Some of you make it sound like there's a huge empty rift between circle jerking elitists and spoiled little brats. Luckily most realise there's a lot in between.