How much do people play ESO, and who should ZOS be catering to?

dk_dunkirk

So there's an interesting post on the Reddit sub where people are posting some sort of Xbox end-of-year summary for their time spent in ESO.

https://www.reddit.com/r/elderscrollsonline/comments/1hle86b/my_year_on_xbox/

The OP shows a screenshot of this EOY summary which shows that he had 266 hours in the game. That's an average of about 5 hours a week. That doesn't sound like a lot to me, yet this put him in the top 4% of all players. With just a few other people chiming in, there are other fascinating takeaways. One person has 1113 hours, which breaks into the top 1%. If I were to use those 2 points to create a graph to show hours in game per week versus the percentage of the player base -- and given that we know there are lunatics who multi-box this thing and put more hours into it than there are in a week -- it would look something like this:



Suddenly, a lot of the activity in game make more sense, like how I'm a member of 5 guilds which are maxxed out at 500 people each, and yet there are usually only a fraction ever logged in at the same time.

There are takeaways on every post, like how Champion of the Gold Road was only obtained by 0.11% of players, and Hero by only 0.06%! Dreadsail Reef has only been completed by 0.29%?! And yes, I understand that these figures are specifically about Xbox, but just like with the Steam chart and basic statistics being what they are, these numbers are absolutely representative of every platform. You can't tell me that, oh, I don't know, say, HALF of the number of people who play on console do trials compared to PC. People are playing the game relatively the same way across all platforms and regions.

A major part of making a commercial product -- a critical part -- is identifying your customers. So who is the ESO customer that ZOS/Microsoft is targeting? Is it the people at the left side of the rise? The bulk of the people with accounts? Or is it the handful of people at the right side, who probably spend all the money? Or is it somewhere in the middle of that tiny section between a handful of hours a week and, say, 50 hours a week, which would be basically all the usable time outside of a full-time job?

Why is this important to understand? Because the people who play 5 hours a week want a lot more bang for their buck. They want maximum return on their time invested. The people who play 50 or more hours a week are "captured." They are obviously unphased by rewards or endeavors or pursuits. They're playing the game no matter what. So it seems to me that ZOS has to balance these two groups. Where's the tipping point? We can see over the past years what they have responded to and what they have done. What does this tell us about who they're catering to in terms of the amount of time spent in game?

AngryPenguin

This is why I never understood ZOS' focus on new players when it's the vets paying the bills. This is why I think U35 may have been the death nail for ESO. That's when the vet community began jumping ship in alarming numbers. Now it seems like ZOS is trying to make up the lost revenue with all kinds of gimmicks and crown store "deals". And just look how much new content has dropped off since U35. It's as if the revenue stream for new development has dropped off a cliff.

Ugrak

My main alone has 255 days, and I've taken a few breaks.

TaSheen

I don't have a total - but for 7 years I've played just about every day, for 6-7 hours a day. Only large breaks were due to family visits or illnesses.

wilykcat

I've played for two years around 3 hours per day. I'm a newer player who loves the game so far.

AngryPenguin

Ugrak wrote: »

My main alone has 255 days, and I've taken a few breaks.

I'm not going to post how many days I have on my account, but it's way more than 255 days. I'm disabled and have used ESO as my main time consumer and socialization platform since 2014. So think 8 hours a day or more 7 days a week for over 10 years now and you'll have my play time. It's a scary big number.

Major_Mangle

The target audience for ESO has always been, and most likely will be, the players who check out the lates update/chapter (maybe buy some cosmetics/crowncrates etc), play for 3-4 weeks and then leaves.

AcadianPaladin

12,000 hours over 8 years.

Zodiarkslayer

I think it is nonsensical to expect ZOS to cater to anyone.
Doing something unexpected or innovative is the best way to get new players. Catering to existing players only serves to make the game stale.

Arunei

The reason ZOS targets newer players over older is because there will ALWAYS be droves of new players checking out the game, especially during Free Play periods. They have access to financial data we never will, and that data probably shows them they get more money from people buying the base game but then maybe only hanging around for a month or two than they get from people who've been playing for years. Which...idk that just doesn't make sense to me honestly, but eh.

I would liken it to high turnover in various industries. I've worked in warehouses a lot, and they tend work their employees like dogs and don't really reward employees who've been around a long time. When there are far more people who need work than will quit an excessively demanding job in a week, why bother trying to retain people, or invest in those who've spent a lot of time working for you? Though plenty of companies also have the tendency to neglect older employees in favor of luring new ones, even if those people will only wind up leaving within a handful of months.

SkaiFaith

dk_dunkirk wrote: »

So there's an interesting post on the Reddit sub where people are posting some sort of Xbox end-of-year summary for their time spent in ESO.

https://www.reddit.com/r/elderscrollsonline/comments/1hle86b/my_year_on_xbox/

The OP shows a screenshot of this EOY summary which shows that he had 266 hours in the game. That's an average of about 5 hours a week. That doesn't sound like a lot to me, yet this put him in the top 4% of all players. With just a few other people chiming in, there are other fascinating takeaways. One person has 1113 hours, which breaks into the top 1%. If I were to use those 2 points to create a graph to show hours in game per week versus the percentage of the player base -- and given that we know there are lunatics who multi-box this thing and put more hours into it than there are in a week -- it would look something like this:



Suddenly, a lot of the activity in game make more sense, like how I'm a member of 5 guilds which are maxxed out at 500 people each, and yet there are usually only a fraction ever logged in at the same time.

There are takeaways on every post, like how Champion of the Gold Road was only obtained by 0.11% of players, and Hero by only 0.06%! Dreadsail Reef has only been completed by 0.29%?! And yes, I understand that these figures are specifically about Xbox, but just like with the Steam chart and basic statistics being what they are, these numbers are absolutely representative of every platform. You can't tell me that, oh, I don't know, say, HALF of the number of people who play on console do trials compared to PC. People are playing the game relatively the same way across all platforms and regions.

A major part of making a commercial product -- a critical part -- is identifying your customers. So who is the ESO customer that ZOS/Microsoft is targeting? Is it the people at the left side of the rise? The bulk of the people with accounts? Or is it the handful of people at the right side, who probably spend all the money? Or is it somewhere in the middle of that tiny section between a handful of hours a week and, say, 50 hours a week, which would be basically all the usable time outside of a full-time job?

Why is this important to understand? Because the people who play 5 hours a week want a lot more bang for their buck. They want maximum return on their time invested. The people who play 50 or more hours a week are "captured." They are obviously unphased by rewards or endeavors or pursuits. They're playing the game no matter what. So it seems to me that ZOS has to balance these two groups. Where's the tipping point? We can see over the past years what they have responded to and what they have done. What does this tell us about who they're catering to in terms of the amount of time spent in game?

I'm in the top 1% on Xbox, with 1.000+ hours this year and more than 3 per day on average.
What I want to say is: I don't think it's a "Zos problem" but a gaming-industry-wide problem. It seems they are more willing to cater to those who never touched a game than to those who have been part of the gaming community for decades - it feels insulting and self-destructive, I will never understand why this is going on and I won't share those people views on this matter.

Note: as I said I am not talking about Zos specifically in this case but about the gaming industry in general.
Also, gaming is not the only one affected.

Desiato

The ultra-casual player *IS* their target audience.

This is why Cyrodiil has been broken for more than 10 years.

It is why the PVE endgame consists of 13 Trials after more than 10 years.

It is why the weapons I earned grinding vMA many years ago are now nMA weapons.

It is why it is basically impossible to die in non-world boss overland encounters.

It is why mechanics are irrelevant in all but a couple of normal dungeons and trials.

It is why the bulk of Chapter budgets have been obviously consumed by story content and vanity items.

I could go on for 20 pages.

The fundamental reality of being an ultra-casual player means that no matter how accessible everything is, they still won't be able to do it all without putting in the time. So those percentages don't mean as much as they seem.

The vast majority of ESO players are most likely people who enjoyed Skyrim and purchased ESO to play it like a single player game. And thus, they have play times akin to that of a single player game.

liliub17_ESO

Not XBox, but maybe this is relevant in general.

On my main account, I have 2,848 hours played - all since several years after Tamriel One dropped. Not sure the play time on the other acct; it's much younger. Having said that, I was a beta tester originally and, after experiencing how much of the feedback from testers was ignored (but eventually used with TamOne), I did not purchase or play on release - very, very rare for me as a tester. I think the only other game that followed that same failed outcome was World of Warplanes.

Log in every day on two accounts, although sometimes that is just to collect the login reward, to be honest. Depends on what kind of day it's been in the 'real world'. So my play time might be ten minutes total a day, or it might be two hours total if I'm exploring. Events do not really change that timing much even if I'm in a guild run - and those are roughly two hours each week.

Who should ESO "cater" to? Depends on what kind of game they finally decide to become.

- PvP is advertised and there's clearly a large number of players who really want to PvP in ESO, yet it seems ZOS doesn't listen well and/or care to develop that facet. It's a shame, honestly.
- PvE newbies? Give them a taste of a gated MMO - which can be largely played solo - doesn't appear entirely logical. [Gated because you have the base game and then the DLCs or dungeons which are not necessarily available during a free trial or to the new player.] MMO implies it is a game which is played by players cooperating in some fashion, something that really only needs to be done in a few instances such as incursion-type situations (some can be soloed with a companion) or enforced co-played such as a group dungeon, etc. For much of the overland PvE, the game may be successfully played solo or with a companion - if you have the correct DLC or chapter to gain said companion(s).
- ...following up on the newbies: The chapters / DLCs do not distinguish between a player who's done the base game and one who's just dropped into game with that content. Even as a 'vet', I find it disconcerting and silly to be lauded as (example) the Hero of Whatever ... when I've never been there, don't know what you're talking about, and huh?
- PvE veterans who've been in-game for a goodly while, 'been there, done that, here for the new goodies'? With servers which appear to be simultaneously increasingly stressed yet oddly emptying in many maps plus the oddity of continued lag issues during the incessant mini-events sometimes coinciding with free weekends / content release / bug fixes / etc. ........

I would honestly forgo a year of new content if the bugs were methodically worked out, PvP was revised to be made whole and viable, and the servers re-populated.

Elsonso

I switched to XBox from PC and logged 820 XBox hours in 2024 to arrive in the top 2%.

I don't think I am the target audience, though.

SilverBride

ZoS shouldn't cater to anyone. They should offer a wide range of activities to appeal to a wide range of players, such as a story to quest through; and challenging content such as dungeons, trials and arenas; and PvP content such as Cyrodiil and battlegrounds; and non-combat activities such as housing and ToT; in other words something for everyone. And they do.

Syldras

I'm at roughly 290 days of play time (220 on my main, 70 on alts) within about 9 years. I was more active in the earlier years than I am now. The main reason is that there's not much to do anymore after content releases have been reduced.

DaniimalsSF

The target audience is $. All decisions by a company this size are based on increasing revenue and profit. The decisions are made using metrics. They are not deciding how to best reward customer loyalty or some philosophical idea of the “kind” of company they want to be. It’s not that complicated. It’s just how capitalism works.

fizzylu

@SilverBride
Honestly, that's probably the one thing they do in fact do better than other MMOs without question.

Warhawke_80

Whatever demographic brings in the most cash...which is for good or bad the casual player...

Syldras

Desiato wrote: »

The ultra-casual player *IS* their target audience.

The story-based quester? Then it would seem like a strange decision to first remove the Q4 story dlc (even before they removed one of the dungeon dlcs) and now even the big chapter.

katanagirl1

SkaiFaith wrote: »

dk_dunkirk wrote: »

So there's an interesting post on the Reddit sub where people are posting some sort of Xbox end-of-year summary for their time spent in ESO.

https://www.reddit.com/r/elderscrollsonline/comments/1hle86b/my_year_on_xbox/

The OP shows a screenshot of this EOY summary which shows that he had 266 hours in the game. That's an average of about 5 hours a week. That doesn't sound like a lot to me, yet this put him in the top 4% of all players. With just a few other people chiming in, there are other fascinating takeaways. One person has 1113 hours, which breaks into the top 1%. If I were to use those 2 points to create a graph to show hours in game per week versus the percentage of the player base -- and given that we know there are lunatics who multi-box this thing and put more hours into it than there are in a week -- it would look something like this:



Suddenly, a lot of the activity in game make more sense, like how I'm a member of 5 guilds which are maxxed out at 500 people each, and yet there are usually only a fraction ever logged in at the same time.

There are takeaways on every post, like how Champion of the Gold Road was only obtained by 0.11% of players, and Hero by only 0.06%! Dreadsail Reef has only been completed by 0.29%?! And yes, I understand that these figures are specifically about Xbox, but just like with the Steam chart and basic statistics being what they are, these numbers are absolutely representative of every platform. You can't tell me that, oh, I don't know, say, HALF of the number of people who play on console do trials compared to PC. People are playing the game relatively the same way across all platforms and regions.

A major part of making a commercial product -- a critical part -- is identifying your customers. So who is the ESO customer that ZOS/Microsoft is targeting? Is it the people at the left side of the rise? The bulk of the people with accounts? Or is it the handful of people at the right side, who probably spend all the money? Or is it somewhere in the middle of that tiny section between a handful of hours a week and, say, 50 hours a week, which would be basically all the usable time outside of a full-time job?

Why is this important to understand? Because the people who play 5 hours a week want a lot more bang for their buck. They want maximum return on their time invested. The people who play 50 or more hours a week are "captured." They are obviously unphased by rewards or endeavors or pursuits. They're playing the game no matter what. So it seems to me that ZOS has to balance these two groups. Where's the tipping point? We can see over the past years what they have responded to and what they have done. What does this tell us about who they're catering to in terms of the amount of time spent in game?

I'm in the top 1% on Xbox, with 1.000+ hours this year and more than 3 per day on average.
What I want to say is: I don't think it's a "Zos problem" but a gaming-industry-wide problem. It seems they are more willing to cater to those who never touched a game than to those who have been part of the gaming community for decades - it feels insulting and self-destructive, I will never understand why this is going on and I won't share those people views on this matter.

Note: as I said I am not talking about Zos specifically in this case but about the gaming industry in general.
Also, gaming is not the only one affected.

Companies in general, I think, are always chasing after new customers and just assume that their current customers are happy and will stick around. Just look at what Bud Light did, and lost most of their existing customer base while gaining few if any new customers. Jaguar is about to do the same thing too, it’ll just take a year for that decision to bear fruit…or not as it may be.

moderatelyfatman

@dk_dunkirk
The result is not surprising since the majority of people who have played ESO are no longer playing ESO. The bulk of players are the ones that fork out $20 for the game (or even get it free to play) and play it for a month or two before moving onto the next shiny new toy. A significant portion will only play the game for a few hours and then move onto something else.

You also have people with multiple alternate accounts who also drive down this average.

This is why ZOS claims they have over 25 million players world wide while their population has been estimated at 25k logins daily.
https://mmo-population.com/r/elderscrollsonline
(And yes, I'm using a very unreliable metric but the exact numbers are less of an issue than the ratio).

A similar issue is present in all games. Take a look at my Steam achievements for Baldur's Gate 3.

The game has been out for 16 months and had 875k at peak and 65k players currently on Steam. Yet according to the achievement, 48% of players haven't even finished the first chapter. Another achievement, 'Descent from Avernus', shows that 10% of players haven't even finished the tutorial.

The bottom line is that person who spent 266 hours in the game was in the top 4% players makes sense when you consider the number of new players who quit after a less than 50. I'd love how that same player would be when you restrict the group to players who have put in more than 100 hours into ESO this year.

Taril

Zodiarkslayer wrote: »

I think it is nonsensical to expect ZOS to cater to anyone.

Not really. Games often thrive on having a consistent playerbase. Thus, things are often "Catered" to that playerbase to ensure their continued to play.

Zodiarkslayer wrote: »

Doing something unexpected or innovative is the best way to get new players. Catering to existing players only serves to make the game stale.

Catering to existing players has nothing to do with the staleness of a game.

You can do unexpected or innovative things while catering to an existing playerbase. By simply... Designing those unexpected or innovative things around what the current players do or expect.

Since catering the existing players doesn't mean "Copy/paste the same content ad nauseum"

Massively changing how things work to "Pull in a new audience" can (And often does) lead to alienating the core playerbase (This was very notable with something like the Saints Row reboot which flopped because it tried to change the underlying tenets of the game which made it not popular among Saints Row fans while not being notable enough for non-fans to actually start liking it)

An example of a game that did this well would be Elden Ring. It still catered towards its normal playerbase, with the punishing action gameplay. But it did the unexpected innovation that was creating the open world with a mount system.

With additional design features added that helped bring in a wider audience (Spirit Summons to make bosses easier, more forgiving Site of Grace locations to provide less frustration, the nature of the open world allowing more straight forward freedom of tackling content in different orders, improved online play reducing frustrating invasions and enabling much better Jolly Cooperation etc.)

None of these additional design features degraded from the core experience, the underlying game was still largely the same as in all prior titles, with its punishing action gameplay that enamored not only this audience but gave rise to an entirely new genre of game (The "Soulslike"). Yet it was still able to be fresh and exciting, enough that non-fans started to play it and actually enjoy it (Some became fans of the genre itself because they were eased into this core gameplay design)

SkaiFaith wrote: »

What I want to say is: I don't think it's a "Zos problem" but a gaming-industry-wide problem. It seems they are more willing to cater to those who never touched a game than to those who have been part of the gaming community for decades - it feels insulting and self-destructive, I will never understand why this is going on and I won't share those people views on this matter.

It comes down to the heavy corporatization of industries. With less focus on "Creating a good product/service" and more focus on "Please the stockholders"

Stockholders want the impossible; to have infinite growth. Thus companies are incentivised not to improve their quality, but to simply reach larger quantities. More people paying is the easiest way to increase revenue (Especially as there are pushbacks to price hikes, understandably so)

It's really noticeable for the video gaming industry since it's young enough that there are people who can actually recall its introduction.

Back before it became infested by corpos, when it was about people with a passion for games making good games because they wanted to play good games.

While nowadays, we have the AAA scene that is entirely focused on pushing out slop that is heavily monetized to maximize profits while minimizing costs.

It's worth noting, that this isn't necessarily developers, but rather executives - Especially those of publishers. Many developers, including those at AAA studios, still want to make the best games possible. They're just handicapped by the decisions of executives. Decsions like unreasonable deadlines, small amounts of funds or deciding what type of game a studio needs to make (So you get studios that have made a name for themselves with amazing single player games that are univsersally loved and then they have to make some live service slop that no-one asked for and importantly, no-one wants)

But it is widespread among all industries. Whereby the key focus is always "Make the most profit" and never "Make the best product" and as such, there's a lot of push to universalize things to try and gain a larger and larger audience.

chessalavakia_ESO

dk_dunkirk wrote: »

So there's an interesting post on the Reddit sub where people are posting some sort of Xbox end-of-year summary for their time spent in ESO.

https://www.reddit.com/r/elderscrollsonline/comments/1hle86b/my_year_on_xbox/

The OP shows a screenshot of this EOY summary which shows that he had 266 hours in the game. That's an average of about 5 hours a week. That doesn't sound like a lot to me, yet this put him in the top 4% of all players. With just a few other people chiming in, there are other fascinating takeaways. One person has 1113 hours, which breaks into the top 1%. If I were to use those 2 points to create a graph to show hours in game per week versus the percentage of the player base -- and given that we know there are lunatics who multi-box this thing and put more hours into it than there are in a week -- it would look something like this:



Suddenly, a lot of the activity in game make more sense, like how I'm a member of 5 guilds which are maxxed out at 500 people each, and yet there are usually only a fraction ever logged in at the same time.

There are takeaways on every post, like how Champion of the Gold Road was only obtained by 0.11% of players, and Hero by only 0.06%! Dreadsail Reef has only been completed by 0.29%?! And yes, I understand that these figures are specifically about Xbox, but just like with the Steam chart and basic statistics being what they are, these numbers are absolutely representative of every platform. You can't tell me that, oh, I don't know, say, HALF of the number of people who play on console do trials compared to PC. People are playing the game relatively the same way across all platforms and regions.

A major part of making a commercial product -- a critical part -- is identifying your customers. So who is the ESO customer that ZOS/Microsoft is targeting? Is it the people at the left side of the rise? The bulk of the people with accounts? Or is it the handful of people at the right side, who probably spend all the money? Or is it somewhere in the middle of that tiny section between a handful of hours a week and, say, 50 hours a week, which would be basically all the usable time outside of a full-time job?

Why is this important to understand? Because the people who play 5 hours a week want a lot more bang for their buck. They want maximum return on their time invested. The people who play 50 or more hours a week are "captured." They are obviously unphased by rewards or endeavors or pursuits. They're playing the game no matter what. So it seems to me that ZOS has to balance these two groups. Where's the tipping point? We can see over the past years what they have responded to and what they have done. What does this tell us about who they're catering to in terms of the amount of time spent in game?

I think many of the people with higher hour counts are actually people that are phased by the rewards/endeavors/pursuits.

For example, I got on today did my daily login on both my accounts. I leveled up my horses on the newer characters. I did one event daily on both accounts. I did one random dungeon to level of my below level 50 character. I did one world boss daily for scribing on my main account. I did one specific dungeon to get another armor piece to complete a set on my newer account. I did one run through of the infinite archive to get an armor piece and hit the leaderboard on my main account so I can maybe get another piece if I don't get a duplicate.

That was all fundamentally reward driven content. I didn't do any of that because I thought it was going to be fun. 99.9% of the fun I had doing it was from watching youtube videos/talking to someone that doesn't play ESO on voice chat.

When it comes to $, I'd expect that a significant portion of the $ is actually coming from the lower hour count players that buy the Chapter play till they get bored and quit because they massively outnumber the other players and the other players may not actually be spending that much more. Personally, all I've spent $ on this year was buying the Chapter.

I think who ZOS should be catering towards depends on the long term plans for the game.

If they plan on keeping ESO around for the next decade, they should be focused on making the casual players stick around and spend more rather than leaving shortly after or before they finish the chapter.

For example, if I was ZOS I'd add the ability to do Dungeons with multiple companions/ npc allies to ESO +.

You've already made the story and the environments for those areas that many of the casual players could likely have a great time with if they aren't stuck rushing through it after waiting in queue.

If they don't plan on keeping ESO around much longer, it's probably better to aim at the more vocal players because they are cheaper to keep amused.

Sakiri

Major_Mangle wrote: »

The target audience for ESO has always been, and most likely will be, the players who check out the lates update/chapter (maybe buy some cosmetics/crowncrates etc), play for 3-4 weeks and then leaves.

And that's a mistake and unhealthy for the livelihood of the game.

Ishtarknows

I think those numbers need to be taken with a pinch of salt. ESO is free to play on Xbox, so the total number of players includes those who downloaded the game for a look while waiting on the release of their favourite game, second/third/fourth accounts just for trading, bot accounts - remember all the complaints about those? The number also includes players who started on Xbox and moved to PC and players who have quit the game years ago and don't intend to come back.
These accounts will (almost) never buy chapters, complete trials or gain achievements and so shouldn't get to influence how current regular players get to play the game.

Calastir

They should cater to players like me, yet for some reason they choose to cater to OP PVP bullies that suck all the fun out of playing.

Northwold

The OP's stat sounds pretty much exactly right for a committed player who doesn't spend all their free time playing ESO. And that, I suspect, is the majority of the regular player base. One of the issues with the forums is that we are all, to a greater or lesser degree, hardcore players, so what we may think "the community" wants ends up being nothing of the kind.

Re catering to new players, in actual fact the new player experience was so badly left to rot that the game had become almost incomprehensible until they switched back to the original opening earlier this year. So I don't think it's accurate to say ZOS had focused their attentions there and they desperately need to focus their attentions on new players more than they have done.

dk_dunkirk

Taril wrote: »

Zodiarkslayer wrote: »

I think it is nonsensical to expect ZOS to cater to anyone.

Not really. Games often thrive on having a consistent playerbase. Thus, things are often "Catered" to that playerbase to ensure their continued to play.

Zodiarkslayer wrote: »

Doing something unexpected or innovative is the best way to get new players. Catering to existing players only serves to make the game stale.

Catering to existing players has nothing to do with the staleness of a game.

You can do unexpected or innovative things while catering to an existing playerbase. By simply... Designing those unexpected or innovative things around what the current players do or expect.

Since catering the existing players doesn't mean "Copy/paste the same content ad nauseum"

Massively changing how things work to "Pull in a new audience" can (And often does) lead to alienating the core playerbase (This was very notable with something like the Saints Row reboot which flopped because it tried to change the underlying tenets of the game which made it not popular among Saints Row fans while not being notable enough for non-fans to actually start liking it)

An example of a game that did this well would be Elden Ring. It still catered towards its normal playerbase, with the punishing action gameplay. But it did the unexpected innovation that was creating the open world with a mount system.

With additional design features added that helped bring in a wider audience (Spirit Summons to make bosses easier, more forgiving Site of Grace locations to provide less frustration, the nature of the open world allowing more straight forward freedom of tackling content in different orders, improved online play reducing frustrating invasions and enabling much better Jolly Cooperation etc.)

None of these additional design features degraded from the core experience, the underlying game was still largely the same as in all prior titles, with its punishing action gameplay that enamored not only this audience but gave rise to an entirely new genre of game (The "Soulslike"). Yet it was still able to be fresh and exciting, enough that non-fans started to play it and actually enjoy it (Some became fans of the genre itself because they were eased into this core gameplay design)

SkaiFaith wrote: »

What I want to say is: I don't think it's a "Zos problem" but a gaming-industry-wide problem. It seems they are more willing to cater to those who never touched a game than to those who have been part of the gaming community for decades - it feels insulting and self-destructive, I will never understand why this is going on and I won't share those people views on this matter.

It comes down to the heavy corporatization of industries. With less focus on "Creating a good product/service" and more focus on "Please the stockholders"

Stockholders want the impossible; to have infinite growth. Thus companies are incentivised not to improve their quality, but to simply reach larger quantities. More people paying is the easiest way to increase revenue (Especially as there are pushbacks to price hikes, understandably so)

It's really noticeable for the video gaming industry since it's young enough that there are people who can actually recall its introduction.

Back before it became infested by corpos, when it was about people with a passion for games making good games because they wanted to play good games.

While nowadays, we have the AAA scene that is entirely focused on pushing out slop that is heavily monetized to maximize profits while minimizing costs.

It's worth noting, that this isn't necessarily developers, but rather executives - Especially those of publishers. Many developers, including those at AAA studios, still want to make the best games possible. They're just handicapped by the decisions of executives. Decsions like unreasonable deadlines, small amounts of funds or deciding what type of game a studio needs to make (So you get studios that have made a name for themselves with amazing single player games that are univsersally loved and then they have to make some live service slop that no-one asked for and importantly, no-one wants)

But it is widespread among all industries. Whereby the key focus is always "Make the most profit" and never "Make the best product" and as such, there's a lot of push to universalize things to try and gain a larger and larger audience.

Totally agree. Their customer is money. Given that, it becomes a little more clear why they don't do many of the things people on here have begged them to do for years. For instance, apparently, they feel that they're not losing any money due to the stuck-in-combat bug, so they don't fix it. Same with the flappy bird.

You'd *think* they'd be losing money by the state of PVP and the unpopular changes to BG, but the fact that the issues around these aspects continue to drag on, year over year, show that they don't think it's a big enough problem, otherwise they'd fix it. PVP accounts for a fraction of the play in the game, so I guess no matter how badly that part is going, it can't help or hinder the bottom line very much.

I think the general consensus of these responses is that ZOS's target demo for this game is very much the casual player, who doesn't care about PVP, endgame set balance issues, the arcanist being OP, or any of the other endless topics that take up these forums. We here represent the 1% of the game, and we're not the target of the strength of their efforts. The funny part is that I think if they'd listen to and implement more of the feedback on these forums, they'd get and retain more casual players even if they don't understand or recognize why the game feels better to them for those changes.

reazea

Zodiarkslayer wrote: »

I think it is nonsensical to expect ZOS to cater to anyone.
Doing something unexpected or innovative is the best way to get new players. Catering to existing players only serves to make the game stale.

You think it's nonsensical for a business to cater to it's paying customers? Catering to existing customers is what pays the bills in most businesses. Yes, businesses need to advertise and create as many new customers as possible, but it's the repeat customers that pay the bills with most businesses.

Jierdanit

Calastir wrote: »

They should cater to players like me, yet for some reason they choose to cater to OP PVP bullies that suck all the fun out of playing.

?