> 82% of players that played launch week, would rather be spending their time playing a different game peak hours.Given the rate of decay for this game, players aren’t very fond of the online play. For the players that do enjoy it good for you.
People always seem to struggle with statistical data and how to interpret it. You need to be careful about what numbers you are looking at. In this case, we are talking about peak population. Peak population (and any momentary population) has no relevance to how many people play the game, but how often people play the game.
The fact that the peak population has dropped to 18% of the launch peak population doesn’t mean 82% of players have completely or even almost completely quit playing. It means that people spend less time playing the game per day as well as that some people may not play it daily.
Another notable thing is that launch day population works under completely different rules than the population months after launch, which makes any comparison between them irrelevant. That is because on launch day, everyone who bought the game is playing. That population includes the relatively small amount of players who will end up playing the game religiously in the months to come, as well as the players who bought it, intended to play it for a while, and then move on to other games. If you want any kind of fair comparison, you should compare the population from month after launch to the latest population. Even then, you should take into account the natural decrease of interest towards the game that happens regardless of the game itself. You simply can’t make a game that interests players the same amount at launch and a year after release.
Finally, you are still only looking at daily peak population. The peak population doesn’t tell how many players actually played the game that day. It doesn’t tell what’s relevant.
Ultimately, population in general doesn’t tell a lot about the game. Okay, it tells how popular the game is. What can we deduce from that? Nothing, really. We can tell what games people are playing and how much. But no matter what, those numbers tell nothing about why the players are playing what they are playing. For all we know, players could be playing CoD instead of Halo because they experience Halo too hard. Alternatively, they could be playing it because it allows for better customization of your loadouts. They could even be playing it because it feels smoother due to the higher framerate. They could be playing it instead of Halo for a lot of reasons, but no matter how much you try, you can’t know the actual reason why they are playing it.
Going back to the population decrease of Halo, the same rules apply. You know the population has decreased, but you can’t say why it has dropped as much as it has, or how the decrease could have been less drastic. Neither can you say how much it would have been had the game been done differently. You can’t even say would the population have been higher or lower if the game had been done differently. Because in the end of the day, play and don’t play games for different reasons. It’s impossible to predict how a game will succeed before it’s released.
