ESO Population Declining @ SteamCharts

Elsonso

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

It's a massive sample size. You can very reliably extrapolate these trends to the rest of the player base.

Common trap. It is not the sample size that matters. It is whether the sample accurately reflects the larger population. Until someone can show me non-Steam numbers so we can reasonably correlate, we don't know to what degree those numbers represent more than just Steam players.

nafensoriel

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

It's a massive sample size. You can very reliably extrapolate these trends to the rest of the player base.

Uh.. what? No, you cant. That is not how statistics work.
It is a sample size drawn from a very tiny portion of the game's population (forum users) in a section of the board where even fewer people visit. It is basically like looking at one square inch of a 100 story building and claiming you can tell jack and squat about its construction quality.

You cant use forum polls as reasonable reflections of a game where 95+% of the player base will never once log into them.

MakoFore

its not just the players - but the types of players- zos is trading their end game pve and pvp players for questers/role players and housing- as evidenced by the fact theyve devoted a whole q4 to questing- and 10 new questing titles- and no new trials or pvp content.

MLGProPlayer

nafensoriel wrote: »

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

It's a massive sample size. You can very reliably extrapolate these trends to the rest of the player base.

Uh.. what? No, you cant. That is not how statistics work.
It is a sample size drawn from a very tiny portion of the game's population (forum users) in a section of the board where even fewer people visit. It is basically like looking at one square inch of a 100 story building and claiming you can tell jack and squat about its construction quality.

You cant use forum polls as reasonable reflections of a game where 95+% of the player base will never once log into them.

We're talking about Steam Charts. The sample is tens of thousands of active players. If I had to guess, Steam probably replresents 20-30% of the game's total population. It's a massive sample.

MLGProPlayer

lordrichter wrote: »

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

It's a massive sample size. You can very reliably extrapolate these trends to the rest of the player base.

Common trap. It is not the sample size that matters. It is whether the sample accurately reflects the larger population. Until someone can show me non-Steam numbers so we can reasonably correlate, we don't know to what degree those numbers represent more than just Steam players.

Steam users aren't behaviouraly any different from non-Steam users so the sample size is the only thing that matters here.

Tandor

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

nafensoriel wrote: »

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

It's a massive sample size. You can very reliably extrapolate these trends to the rest of the player base.

Uh.. what? No, you cant. That is not how statistics work.
It is a sample size drawn from a very tiny portion of the game's population (forum users) in a section of the board where even fewer people visit. It is basically like looking at one square inch of a 100 story building and claiming you can tell jack and squat about its construction quality.

You cant use forum polls as reasonable reflections of a game where 95+% of the player base will never once log into them.

We're talking about Steam Charts. The sample is tens of thousands of active players. If I had to guess, Steam probably replresents 20-30% of the game's total population. It's a massive sample.

Do you have any reason to think that the original statement by ZOS that the three platforms are broadly equal in population was either inaccurate or has changed?If so, what are your sources? If not, then you are suggesting that virtually the whole of the PC playerbase plays the game through Steam, an assertion which I imagine you would be hard pressed to substantiate!

Elsonso

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

lordrichter wrote: »

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

It's a massive sample size. You can very reliably extrapolate these trends to the rest of the player base.

Common trap. It is not the sample size that matters. It is whether the sample accurately reflects the larger population. Until someone can show me non-Steam numbers so we can reasonably correlate, we don't know to what degree those numbers represent more than just Steam players.

Steam users aren't behaviouraly any different from non-Steam users so the sample size is the only thing that matters here.

You can't make that determination. Sure, if we were talking about people who visit Vvardenfell, or how many people have DKs, Steam Charts would probably be fine. Logging into the game? There are different factors on each of the platforms that can determine usage of the game. For us, whatever we get from Steam Charts is anecdotal across the larger player population.

Facefister

Twitch:

ESO - 2k viewers, 823k followers
FF - 3k viewers, 842k followers
WoW - 114k viewers, 6m followers
GW2 - 527 viewers, 403k followers

MLGProPlayer

lordrichter wrote: »

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

lordrichter wrote: »

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

It's a massive sample size. You can very reliably extrapolate these trends to the rest of the player base.

Common trap. It is not the sample size that matters. It is whether the sample accurately reflects the larger population. Until someone can show me non-Steam numbers so we can reasonably correlate, we don't know to what degree those numbers represent more than just Steam players.

Steam users aren't behaviouraly any different from non-Steam users so the sample size is the only thing that matters here.

You can't make that determination. Sure, if we were talking about people who visit Vvardenfell, or how many people have DKs, Steam Charts would probably be fine. Logging into the game? There are different factors on each of the platforms that can determine usage of the game. For us, whatever we get from Steam Charts is anecdotal across the larger player population.

You can absolutely make that determination. There is absolutely nothing empirical or theoretical you can draw on to assume that Steam users are behaviourally different from non-Steam users.

MLGProPlayer

Tandor wrote: »

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

nafensoriel wrote: »

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

It's a massive sample size. You can very reliably extrapolate these trends to the rest of the player base.

Uh.. what? No, you cant. That is not how statistics work.
It is a sample size drawn from a very tiny portion of the game's population (forum users) in a section of the board where even fewer people visit. It is basically like looking at one square inch of a 100 story building and claiming you can tell jack and squat about its construction quality.

You cant use forum polls as reasonable reflections of a game where 95+% of the player base will never once log into them.

We're talking about Steam Charts. The sample is tens of thousands of active players. If I had to guess, Steam probably replresents 20-30% of the game's total population. It's a massive sample.

Do you have any reason to think that the original statement by ZOS that the three platforms are broadly equal in population was either inaccurate or has changed?If so, what are your sources? If not, then you are suggesting that virtually the whole of the PC playerbase plays the game through Steam, an assertion which I imagine you would be hard pressed to substantiate!

I meant that Steam likely represents 20-30% of the total PC population.

Cpt_Teemo

I would say Steam is more like 5% tbh

Elsonso

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

lordrichter wrote: »

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

lordrichter wrote: »

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

It's a massive sample size. You can very reliably extrapolate these trends to the rest of the player base.

Common trap. It is not the sample size that matters. It is whether the sample accurately reflects the larger population. Until someone can show me non-Steam numbers so we can reasonably correlate, we don't know to what degree those numbers represent more than just Steam players.

Steam users aren't behaviouraly any different from non-Steam users so the sample size is the only thing that matters here.

You can't make that determination. Sure, if we were talking about people who visit Vvardenfell, or how many people have DKs, Steam Charts would probably be fine. Logging into the game? There are different factors on each of the platforms that can determine usage of the game. For us, whatever we get from Steam Charts is anecdotal across the larger player population.

You can absolutely make that determination. There is absolutely nothing empirical or theoretical you can draw on to assume that Steam users are behaviourally different from non-Steam users.

We have to agree to disagree. The same argument applies to your position, so we are at a deadlock. You have nothing that substantiates what you are saying, either.

Sharee

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

Tandor wrote: »

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

nafensoriel wrote: »

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

It's a massive sample size. You can very reliably extrapolate these trends to the rest of the player base.

Uh.. what? No, you cant. That is not how statistics work.
It is a sample size drawn from a very tiny portion of the game's population (forum users) in a section of the board where even fewer people visit. It is basically like looking at one square inch of a 100 story building and claiming you can tell jack and squat about its construction quality.

You cant use forum polls as reasonable reflections of a game where 95+% of the player base will never once log into them.

We're talking about Steam Charts. The sample is tens of thousands of active players. If I had to guess, Steam probably replresents 20-30% of the game's total population. It's a massive sample.

Do you have any reason to think that the original statement by ZOS that the three platforms are broadly equal in population was either inaccurate or has changed?If so, what are your sources? If not, then you are suggesting that virtually the whole of the PC playerbase plays the game through Steam, an assertion which I imagine you would be hard pressed to substantiate!

I meant that Steam likely represents 20-30% of the total PC population.

Does it? It shows 25K concurrent players in the graph posted earlier. If that is 1/3 of PC population, and PC population is 1/3 of total population, that would put the max concurrent players just under 230K. Meanwhile, google says:

"How many players does ESO have 2019?
We've just seen the launch of a new Elder Scrolls Online expansion, and the game's had a big year. ESO has picked up 2.5 million new players in the past 12 months, bringing the total player count up to 13.5 million players over the game's lifetime just after the release of Elsweyr."

Even realising that those millions of players are unlikely to play all at once, based on these numbers I would still say that steam represents way less than 30% of total PC population.

Facefister

YouTube:

ZenimaxOnlineStudios - 114k subscribers
FINAL FANTASY XIV - 328k subscribers
World of Warcraft - 1.31m subscribers
Guild Wars 2 - 153K subscribers

Jaraal

Sharee wrote: »

Even realising that those millions of players are unlikely to play all at once

I'd be more interested to know how many of those millions of players have NOT played... in years.

Of the millions of players who have downloaded the game... some of them free trials, second (third, fourth, etc) accounts, bot accounts and so forth... how many still log in on a regular basis? I know just a small fraction of the thousands of people I have seen in my guild rosters still play. And that's folks organized and motivated enough to join a guild. Thousands have been kicked for inactivity, and that's only in the six guilds I've ever been in over the years.

Regardless, it's safe to say that the vast majority of the millions of people who have ever registered for the game have long since moved on. Prove me wrong, I'll wait.

Facefister

I've said it earlier, as long as we don't know the amount of ESO+ members, we can only speculate. If we go by "accounts" then 13m accounts are tiny in comparison to other games. Blizzard says there are 40m Overwatch players and yet Overwatch is dead.

Elsonso

Sharee wrote: »

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

I meant that Steam likely represents 20-30% of the total PC population.

Does it? It shows 25K concurrent players in the graph posted earlier. If that is 1/3 of PC population, and PC population is 1/3 of total population, that would put the max concurrent players just under 230K. Meanwhile, google says:

"How many players does ESO have 2019?
We've just seen the launch of a new Elder Scrolls Online expansion, and the game's had a big year. ESO has picked up 2.5 million new players in the past 12 months, bringing the total player count up to 13.5 million players over the game's lifetime just after the release of Elsweyr."

Even realising that those millions of players are unlikely to play all at once, based on these numbers I would still say that steam represents way less than 30% of total PC population.

You are mixing numbers. Daily average players vs new player accounts.

If we believe statistics and forum polls, it is reasonable to surmise that there are about 3x the number of non-Steam players as there are Steam players, making the daily PC (NA+EU) player base around 50k average and 100k peak. Those numbers are probably not exactly accurate, since they are based on a forum poll, but hey...

nafensoriel

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

nafensoriel wrote: »

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

It's a massive sample size. You can very reliably extrapolate these trends to the rest of the player base.

Uh.. what? No, you cant. That is not how statistics work.
It is a sample size drawn from a very tiny portion of the game's population (forum users) in a section of the board where even fewer people visit. It is basically like looking at one square inch of a 100 story building and claiming you can tell jack and squat about its construction quality.

You cant use forum polls as reasonable reflections of a game where 95+% of the player base will never once log into them.

We're talking about Steam Charts. The sample is tens of thousands of active players. If I had to guess, Steam probably replresents 20-30% of the game's total population. It's a massive sample.

We have actual monthly unique login numbers quoted from the president of ZOS themselves. They went up 500k in two years.
Steam has no bearing on reality. The number is not a ratio you can poll. By the listed numbers assuming all platforms are at 500k/uu/m the paultry 25k on steam isn't even a rounding error. Considering all MMOs have terrible steam population figures if they started outside of steam and then transitioned to steam you can safely assume they have no statistical value whatsoever.

Facefister

Monthly login doesn't reflect active playerbase.

MLGProPlayer

Sharee wrote: »

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

Tandor wrote: »

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

nafensoriel wrote: »

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

It's a massive sample size. You can very reliably extrapolate these trends to the rest of the player base.

Uh.. what? No, you cant. That is not how statistics work.
It is a sample size drawn from a very tiny portion of the game's population (forum users) in a section of the board where even fewer people visit. It is basically like looking at one square inch of a 100 story building and claiming you can tell jack and squat about its construction quality.

You cant use forum polls as reasonable reflections of a game where 95+% of the player base will never once log into them.

We're talking about Steam Charts. The sample is tens of thousands of active players. If I had to guess, Steam probably replresents 20-30% of the game's total population. It's a massive sample.

Do you have any reason to think that the original statement by ZOS that the three platforms are broadly equal in population was either inaccurate or has changed?If so, what are your sources? If not, then you are suggesting that virtually the whole of the PC playerbase plays the game through Steam, an assertion which I imagine you would be hard pressed to substantiate!

I meant that Steam likely represents 20-30% of the total PC population.

Does it? It shows 25K concurrent players in the graph posted earlier. If that is 1/3 of PC population, and PC population is 1/3 of total population, that would put the max concurrent players just under 230K. Meanwhile, google says:

"How many players does ESO have 2019?
We've just seen the launch of a new Elder Scrolls Online expansion, and the game's had a big year. ESO has picked up 2.5 million new players in the past 12 months, bringing the total player count up to 13.5 million players over the game's lifetime just after the release of Elsweyr."

Even realising that those millions of players are unlikely to play all at once, based on these numbers I would still say that steam represents way less than 30% of total PC population.

Concurrent = currently logged on

MLGProPlayer

nafensoriel wrote: »

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

nafensoriel wrote: »

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

It's a massive sample size. You can very reliably extrapolate these trends to the rest of the player base.

Uh.. what? No, you cant. That is not how statistics work.
It is a sample size drawn from a very tiny portion of the game's population (forum users) in a section of the board where even fewer people visit. It is basically like looking at one square inch of a 100 story building and claiming you can tell jack and squat about its construction quality.

You cant use forum polls as reasonable reflections of a game where 95+% of the player base will never once log into them.

We're talking about Steam Charts. The sample is tens of thousands of active players. If I had to guess, Steam probably replresents 20-30% of the game's total population. It's a massive sample.

We have actual monthly unique login numbers quoted from the president of ZOS themselves. They went up 500k in two years.
Steam has no bearing on reality. The number is not a ratio you can poll. By the listed numbers assuming all platforms are at 500k/uu/m the paultry 25k on steam isn't even a rounding error. Considering all MMOs have terrible steam population figures if they started outside of steam and then transitioned to steam you can safely assume they have no statistical value whatsoever.

Steam charts isn't monthly logons. It's users currently logged on.

Those are two completely different numbers.

And it doesn't change the fact that the Steam sample is more than large enough to extrapolate trends from.

Grandma

I would attribute a huge chunk of that to new players realizing steam frequently doesn't work on the launching thing, and that a lot of players i know- a lot- buy eso for 10$ just to swap off steam so they don't have to use it. I'm this close to doing so as well, since I switched to PC after steam made it so you can't launch from the files anymore [which didn't work retroactively, fortunately for older players]

nafensoriel

@Facefister Actually monthly unique logons is the de facto metric for the population of MMOs.

@MLGProPlayer
The daily average is month/30 for all practical purposes. It's the same principle and no it's not really significant. You are looking at too small a dataset in exclusion to the whole. At best you are looking at a fraction of 1/6th the total population of the game in those figures.

Tell me how you can extrapolate anything from such a small and incomparable subset of data, please. I'm curious about your line of thinking. As it stands all I can see in your data is cherrypicked figures which does not a good argument make.

MLGProPlayer

nafensoriel wrote: »

@Facefister Actually monthly unique logons is the de facto metric for the population of MMOs.

@MLGProPlayer
The daily average is month/30 for all practical purposes. It's the same principle and no it's not really significant. You are looking at too small a dataset in exclusion to the whole. At best you are looking at a fraction of 1/6th the total population of the game in those figures.

Tell me how you can extrapolate anything from such a small and incomparable subset of data, please. I'm curious about your line of thinking. As it stands all I can see in your data is cherrypicked figures which does not a good argument make.

Total monthly logins is completely different from concurrent players. A player can log in once in a month and never again. That tells us nothing about the activity of the population.

As to your second point, a sample size >10,000 (the total Steam sample is likely in the 100,000s) is more than enough for any statistical testing.

EchoirVarsoj

I wouldn't be that alarmed, ESO is s B2P MMO.
There could be a lot of reasons like Classic launch, recent patches, etc. but the doors are always open for players to comeback. Eventually people would come back to the check how's the game doing.
Also the devs have all the data and they know when something is discouraging players from checking new content.

Casterial

Lord_Eomer wrote: »

ZOS is again on a wrong track, nerfing everything and letting players leave ESO.

Lack of good contents are also to blame, players are asking for new Solo Arena or Duo but Q4 DLC becomes such a disappointment.

I have also taken a break from ESO, will get back once ZOS start putting things back on track.



Source: https://steamcharts.com/app/306130

Most, if not almost all my friends don't have this game through steam.

Marcus684

If you really want to gauge a game's potential longevity, look at its income. 10k, 50k, 100k logins/accounts don't mean squat if they aren't paying to play. Look at subscriptions and crown store purchases. As long as the game keeps meeting ZOS' profit thresholds they'll keep it running. If not, and we will never know if it's not, then you can expect the game to fold. All this "the game is dying" BS that's been going on since the game first opened is just sour-grapes (former) players trying to justify their negativity.

Sharee

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

Sharee wrote: »

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

Tandor wrote: »

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

nafensoriel wrote: »

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

It's a massive sample size. You can very reliably extrapolate these trends to the rest of the player base.

Uh.. what? No, you cant. That is not how statistics work.
It is a sample size drawn from a very tiny portion of the game's population (forum users) in a section of the board where even fewer people visit. It is basically like looking at one square inch of a 100 story building and claiming you can tell jack and squat about its construction quality.

You cant use forum polls as reasonable reflections of a game where 95+% of the player base will never once log into them.

We're talking about Steam Charts. The sample is tens of thousands of active players. If I had to guess, Steam probably replresents 20-30% of the game's total population. It's a massive sample.

Do you have any reason to think that the original statement by ZOS that the three platforms are broadly equal in population was either inaccurate or has changed?If so, what are your sources? If not, then you are suggesting that virtually the whole of the PC playerbase plays the game through Steam, an assertion which I imagine you would be hard pressed to substantiate!

I meant that Steam likely represents 20-30% of the total PC population.

Does it? It shows 25K concurrent players in the graph posted earlier. If that is 1/3 of PC population, and PC population is 1/3 of total population, that would put the max concurrent players just under 230K. Meanwhile, google says:

"How many players does ESO have 2019?
We've just seen the launch of a new Elder Scrolls Online expansion, and the game's had a big year. ESO has picked up 2.5 million new players in the past 12 months, bringing the total player count up to 13.5 million players over the game's lifetime just after the release of Elsweyr."

Even realising that those millions of players are unlikely to play all at once, based on these numbers I would still say that steam represents way less than 30% of total PC population.

Concurrent = currently logged on

I took that into account in the post you quoted: "Even realising that those millions of players are unlikely to play all at once..."

I am simply expressing my disbelief that in a game who recently acquired 2.5 millions of new players (on top of whatever millions already were playing), 30% of its PC playerbase is only represented by 25K concurrent players.

Reistr_the_Unbroken

So apparently according to some people: somehow there’s more people on steam than people on both consoles combined.

Yeah I’m not buying that.

Facefister

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

As to your second point, a sample size >10,000 (the total Steam sample is likely in the 100,000s) is more than enough for any statistical testing.

You're correct. Take surveys as an example. The most precise data would be asking the entire population but asking like 10k people out of 1 million is also enough because percentages don't fluctuate that much after asking additional 10k people. The Steam chart isn't maybe 100% precise but it tells us the direction.

@Sharee
New players could mean anything, players who tested the game during free trials, people who bought it for 2$ because it was on sale or it's an additional account. As long as we don't see the ESO+ subscriptions, we will never surely know. There are many ways to tinker with this. For example, ZoS temporarily boosts it's views by giving away crates during Q&A sessions.