Chasing it is a good, time-tested way to see your game flop. I know plenty about head to head multiplayer in the strategy genre, dude, and that's how I know that it is simply not a popular draw. Age of Empires 4 tried to chase the competitive scene, and the playerbase numbers nosedived to about half of Age of Empires 2, which holds steady primarily because of its campaign/modding content and cult classic appeal. You know what proportion of the playerbase has that 'play 10 ranked multiplayer matches, win or lose' achievement they added? 1%. Hell, Planetary Annihilation pivoted pretty hard towards competitive play. Only 2.3% of that HBS Battletech strategy game's playerbase have ever won a multiplayer match, and only ZERO POINT SEVEN percent have played (not won, *played*) 5. Company of Heroes 1 and 2 are rightly regarded as classics - less than 15% of their playerbase have queued up for multiplayer. Total Warhammer 3 makes its multiplayer skirmishes incredibly easy to get into, it inherits a long-running multiplayer community, and still less than a third of the playerbase have tried a match - and a lot of that probably comes from people doing co-op campaigns or doing a single match for achievement-hunting, because per dev comments the actual dedicated multiplayer community is like, 5% of the playerbase. Age of Wonders: Planetfall? Less than 3% have played enough multiplayer to have the 'win a match' achievement. Iron Harvest? Only 19% of players have even tried multiplayer for a single match. Grey Goo? About 6.5% of the playerbase has any of the multiplayer achievements. Yet the breakout hits of the game's development history have been things like the arcade and co-op modes, while the much-touted head-to-head Archon mode was dead on arrival.Ĭheck the achievement data for other strategy games sometime, you can see how popular the multiplayer is. And that's the high-water mark of popularity for head-to-head multiplayer in strategy games as a genre, with Blizzard's marketing pushing Starcraft's reputation as the big boy competitive esports game. Guess what? Per the devs comments, Starcraft's playerbase splits about 80/20 in favour of single-player or co-op content.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |