I wonder what other games came out around these drops, that only people who have bought the game through Steam would also be playing. Certainly not 'definite ESO Killer' New Worlds, or Elden Ring, or Stray that everyone and their nan's is playing. No no, this routine dip of two thousand Steam-only players is PROOF that the game is dying.

*sigh* the dying game rhetoric is back [snip]

I am having flashbacks to the Morrowind patch.

[edited for baiting]

There’s a dip, probably because of the last update. It doesn’t mean that the game is dying. There’s 12k players this weekday morning, it’s still more than we had in some 2018-2019 average monthly players.

I play on PC. I play directly through the ESO launcher.

Does Steam Charts reflect my play?
What about the people playing on Xbox?
The PlayStation user base?

A lot more people than 12,000 people play ESO. If anything, the steam chart is evidence of how few players play directly through Steam than “a dying game.”

Riptide wrote: »

Narvuntien wrote: »

*sigh* the dying game rhetoric is back [snip]

I am having flashbacks to the Morrowind patch.

Well since the Morrowind patch decimated the endgame community for an extended period of time that follows. And as it hasn’t reached consoles yet, where it will be felt more acutely, so there will be more to come.

Particularly if week one U36 PTS a couple of weeks after that show little change in direction. If that is the case, and it is better than 50/50, then it will get considerably worse before it gets better.

And Morrowind was relatively early in this game’s lifecycle. This isn’t.

What patch was Morrowind?

[edited to remove quote]

edward_frigidhands wrote: »

Riptide wrote: »

Narvuntien wrote: »

*sigh* the dying game rhetoric is back [snip]

I am having flashbacks to the Morrowind patch.

Well since the Morrowind patch decimated the endgame community for an extended period of time that follows. And as it hasn’t reached consoles yet, where it will be felt more acutely, so there will be more to come.

Particularly if week one U36 PTS a couple of weeks after that show little change in direction. If that is the case, and it is better than 50/50, then it will get considerably worse before it gets better.

And Morrowind was relatively early in this game’s lifecycle. This isn’t.

What patch was Morrowind?

I don’t recall the update number but it was the one that killed sustain really, really badly.

And new trial was all about sustain

[edited to remove quote]

MaraxusTheOrc wrote: »

I play on PC. I play directly through the ESO launcher.

Does Steam Charts reflect my play?
What about the people playing on Xbox?
The PlayStation user base?

A lot more people than 12,000 people play ESO. If anything, the steam chart is evidence of how few players play directly through Steam than “a dying game.”

The Steam Charts mean nothing as far as how a MMO is doing. Most people who play MMOs like ESO, WoW, BDO, etc, use the game's own launch to reduce lag and connectivity problems. Also many people will test out a MMO on Steam and if they like it, will dump Steam's version and use the MMO's own launcher.

I wonder to what extent this statistic represents the pandemic with its lockdowns... I mean, in spring 2020 (peak), millions of people were sitting at home and couldn't go out. The numbers go down especially from spring 2022, i.e. at a time when everything has largely returned to normal and people are no longer sitting at home for months.

According to that chart the game has roughly the same number of Steam players as in May and the peak players shows almost 4,000 more than in March (when the population dropped over 10,000 from the previous month, then went up again). It's also about the same or higher than it was throughout 2019. Was the game dying then too?

Statistically there's no pattern here. Yes the past 2 months show a slight drop, but there's many other instances of the same thing balanced out by subsequent increases. The graph for 1 year is pretty flat and the all time graph actually shows an average increase.

I know some people aren't happy about the latest update, but if you're going to use data to show the game is dying you need to pick data which actually shows that.

While the Steam charts show a decline in players in recent months, it hardly shows the game is dying. For years there have been players claiming ESO is dying and dead. So far, those claims have been proven to be empty.

Using steam to see population isn't exactly a sign of a dying game is it. There is also 2 other platforms which you cant see. Do you really thing a multi billion company would deliberately hurt- kill the game with an update. People say SWTOR has been dying since 2011 guess what, its still online with a community. I know SWTOR is small but my point is the game is still online, ESO has a huge player base compared to SWTOR and wont be going anyway i assure you.

kmufc77b16_ESO wrote: »

Using steam to see population isn't exactly a sign of a dying game is it. There is also 2 other platforms which you cant see. Do you really thing a multi billion company would deliberately hurt- kill the game with an update. People say SWTOR has been dying since 2011 guess what its still online with a community. I know SWTOR is small but my point is the games is still online, ESO has a huge player base compared to SWTOR and wont be going anyway i assure you.

SWTOR is not a good example. Their player base is a small fraction of what is was years ago. They are down to five servers. North America had dozens of servers early on and only two now. They do not use the mega server design ESO has. On top of that, they no longer do world-building. Their expansions are pathetically small since the game no longer has the population to support anything meaningful.

Is it dead? No, but it is certainly on life support and is no longer considered a triple-A game due to being poorly managed, mostly due to how they chose to release content.

It's not a dying game,maybe just less ppl using steam to play cause it eats resources while open.Also someone said Cyro is deder since update,but it's a weekday,and Cyro always deader on weekdays.People always making doom and gloom posts on every forum in every game,especially after an update.

In defense of OP, if you assume at the most that steam contains 50% of the population the metrics get worse if it's less. Then in the past month, we had gone from a peak of 27k to a peak of 15-18k prior to the patch drop which naturally creates a small spike back to a more acceptable number. ESO has been on a downward trend since Greymoor. It is saddening to see and they are pointing this out as ZOS should look at this as a matter. Players/gamers have a nature of seeing these trends and leaving as well which makes others leave and continue on all of that. ESO/steam charts indicate the average count has dipped ~3,000 active players. This is a serious issue when the players not talking are leaving. We need to do what we can as a community and the developers to fix things that are causing people to leave. We don't want people to leave and neither does ZOS.

The combat team I feel isn't paying as much focus into what the community wants. Anecdotal evidence is far more valuable than some of them talk about it. If it doesn't feel good to play then people won't play. For example, a developer should never go "Oh it'll be rough, but we'll make it through these changes". You should never look at the player base like it's okay to make them unhappy and just be alright with that. They've given impressions that make me feel there may be people with egos unchecked making these choices and will continue to hemorrhage players until they check their egos and listen to the players first.

I want ZOS to improve on this and correct the issues they have internally for the communities sake. Their competitors are paying more attention to the players' needs and doing what they want better. ZOS isn't competing with themselves, they have other companies wanting to and are treating their players better on Anecdotal evidence that are being more successful. I really hope they can look at the companies doing it better and see what they can do to improve it for their culture as well to make their players happy.

I know what I will be doing: moving to world of warcraft when it eventually comes to series x/consoles post-acquisition of activision blizzard by microsoft.

[snip]
[edited for conspiracy theory/misinformation]