Tag: Traffic

Wild West Online To Offer Free Trial As Traffic Drops


Wild West Online is preparing to implement a free trial as its Steam numbers continue to drop. Having released barely a month ago, Wild West Online launched to a peak of 559 players on Steam and currently sits at less than 40 as of this writing with a 24 hour peak of 84.

“We’re adding free trial version of the game. It’ll be available both at our website as well as thru Steam on a game’s store page. Free trial version will let users to play game as a normal player, but with some restrictions.”

Trial accounts will be restricted to level 20 and will not be able to unlock achievements or receive rewards. Wild West Online currently sits at a 37% “mostly negative” rating on Steam.

(Source: Steam)

Charturday: How Call of Duty Fares on Steam


Statistics pulled from Steam Charts using the multiplayer version (when available) for each title. Black Ops 2 Z is the zombie mode.

With the recent launch of Call of Duty: WW2, I thought I’d dedicate the first Charturday to looking into how the series has performed on Steam where the game has been decidedly less popular than its console cousins. Black Ops 3, for instance, performed poorly enough on PC that Activision introduced a multiplayer only starter pack for $15 to get people playing. Infinite Warfare and its packed-in Modern Warfare Remastered appear to have completely bombed on the system as well at least in terms of Call of Duty numbers, peaking at 15,000 and 1,300 respectively. Battleborn, by comparison, peaked at 12,000.

World War 2, on the other hand, seems to have attracted a lot of support. Its peak statistics haven’t risen to the levels of Treyarch success, that being Black Ops 2 and Black Ops 3, but they are decidedly higher than both Infinite Warfare and Modern Warfare Remastered several times over. Regardless, if you were looking to pick up Call of Duty and were afraid of it being dead on PC right out of launch, well consider those fears put to rest for the time being.

[Community] PC Gaming May Not Be Dead, But Lawbreakers Is Starting Out Weak


Cliff Bleszinski has a long history with PC games, although you may not know it if you just started gaming within the last ten years. For a while, Bleszinski had a great relationship with the PC platform, until Unreal Tournament allegedly sold quite poorly on the system (according to Gamespy online stats from the time), leading up to 2008 where Bleszinski announced that Gears of War 2 would not be coming to PC, blaming piracy. In reality, Gears of War 2 didn’t come to PC because it was an Xbox platform exclusive.

“The person who is savvy enough to want to have a good PC to upgrade their video card, is a person who is savvy enough to know [BitTorrent] to know all the elements so they can pirate software. Therefore, high-end videogames are suffering very much on the PC.”

Certain developers have been exaggerating the effects of piracy on PC for years, going further back than 2011 with Ubisoft claiming that 95% of PC consumers would pirate their product, a factor that runs in direct contradiction to their investor reports which consistently show great sales on PC. As a result of his snubbing of the community, Bleszinski’s name has been somewhat dragged through the mud over the years.

Now Bleszinski apologized for his comment at the 2015 Game Awards, alongside showcasing his upcoming (now released) game Lawbreakers. Well Lawbreakers has launched and while it is receiving very positive reviews, from critics and gamers (87% positive on Steam), the population on PC has been slow to adopt the title. Steam Charts shows a launch day peak of 3,000 which has been steadily dropping over the past week. By comparison, Battleborn launched to a day one peak of 12,000 and is presently sitting at a peak of 280 over the last 30 days, including free trial players.

Bleszinski, for his part, has already responded to news comparing Lawbreakers to Battleborn, noting that the game is “a marathon not a sprint,” and that he would “rather be the underhyped game that slowly ramps up into something that people adore than something that comes out with way too much hype that there’s a backlash for, which is why I think the Steam reviews are so positive.” You can check out the entire interview at Eurogamer.

As for Lawbreakers, we will need to wait and see if the game is able to attract more publicity, and thus a more active population, and what plans are in store should traffic continue to dwindle.

Wildstar Finds New Life On Steam


wildstar

Wildstar has been on Steam for nearly a month, and it looks like the population has remained pretty stable since the initial launch day. While the game doesn’t look like it’ll be topping any sales records, it looks like Steam has introduced new life to the previously waning MMO.

In its first month on Steam, Wildstar peaked at five thousand players. As the chart shows, it’s been pretty stable since then with an average of 1.5 thousand concurrent users and a daily peak of about three thousand. Concurrent users predictably rise and drop over the course of each day, with the low points in activity during overnight periods in the west.

The community seems mostly pleased, with 77% positive reviews on Steam.

Extra Free Trial Time For FFXIV


ffxiv_08292013_130902

If there is one word that can be used to describe Final Fantasy XIV’s launch, it would be “extra smooth,” in that it is neither one word nor is it accurate. While Square Enix continues to monitor server stability and population, and while FFXIV remains unavailable for purchase, Naoki Yoshida has once again turned to the forums to explain that they are indeed working on solutions to overpopulation and a general inability for players to log in or create characters due to overwhelming traffic. Wednesday will see the addition of new worlds, tweaks to existing servers, and more.

As an apology to fans who are unable to log in, or having difficulty creating characters, Square Enix will be extending the free trial period for seven days to all players, including those returning from legacy 1.0 accounts. Trial extension will be handed out on Wednesday with the server maintenance.

(Source: FFXIV)