Game companies don’t share their budgets, but it’s probably fair to assume that The Witcher III is a more expensive game to make than Rocket League.Īnd that is the crucial point here. In fact, the one blockbuster that hasn’t lost its place at the top of the chart is Grand Theft Auto V, and that has a massively popular live-service mode in GTA Online. But even something like Fallout 4 quickly fell back behind games like Rust and Ark. What this chart drives home more than anything is that making a massive, triple-A blockbuster is potentially not worth the cost. This doesn’t even count the thriving and growing audience for live-service games on console, which includes Warframe, Rocket League, and Siege. And survival sims Rust and Ark: Survival Evolved are also nearly always on the chart. The car-soccer game Rocket League is almost always in the top 10. Other live service games have seen similar staying power. It’s gone from approximately 40,000 daily peak concurrent players on Steam in 2017 to regularly having more than 100,000 by the end of 2018. But it has turned into a monster ever since. It doesn’t even consistently rank among the most-played games on Steam until early 2017. Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six: Siege did not crack the top 15 when it debuted in December 2015. And it’s not the only game to follow that trajectory. Warframe started small, and it has grown over time. Throughout all of last year, Warframe’s daily peak concurrent players is in the 70,000-to-80,000 range with those occasional peaks closer to 100,000. That number gets leaps over 100,000 players by October 2017. What’s most impressive about Warframe, however, is that its daily peak concurrent number grows over time. And as the video reveals, it was consistently in the top 15 all the way through December 2018. The free-to-play sci-fi shooter was also still among the 15 most played games on Steam. Live-service games stick around for years and can even grow over timeīy January 2015, Warframe was already almost two years old. But the behavior of this chart highlights how a game like The Witcher III may not get the best return on investment. Games like that can obviously still make money. It’s a single-player campaign that you experience and then put away. But CD Projekt Red did not build it to hang on this list. The Witcher III is one of the biggest games of the last five years. And even when a blockbuster does come along, it tends to falls off the charts after a few weeks - or sometimes in a few days.ĭid you even notice The Witcher III: Wild Hunt on the chart? It popped up to No. The first thing I noticed while watching this video is just how infrequently we get games that are big enough to make a dent on Steam. Blockbusters exist, but they come and then go But let’s talk about what it highlights and what it reveals. Hit the GitHyp link above for the rest of the data.You can watch the chart in action by clicking play on the video at the top of this list. Perhaps if Ubisoft decides to show the player count in upcoming games like Ghost Recon: Wildlands, we'll able to test this theory further. This is also a good sign that despite splintering off to create its own client and store with Uplay years ago, Ubisoft games still sell better through Steam directly - even when they're more expensive in most cases, and don't offer any additional features on Steam. All versions play on the same servers and rely on the Ubisoft microtransactions store - accessible through Uplay - to purchase any additional content. First, Steam copies still need to launch Uplay to play, so there's technically no benefit in buying it on Steam. This is very interesting for a number of reasons. In short, around 54% of the player base bought their copies through Steam. That same weekend, the in-game stats reported 83,000 online players on PC, which means around 38,000 players bought a Uplay key, through Uplay directly, or received a free copy as part of an Nvidia GTX bundle. On Steam alone, the game brought in 45,836 players on launch day, and 45,944 on Saturday of that weekend. The site tracked the game's launch numbers provided through the in-game counter, which accounts for all versions, and compared it against Steam's own player stats. That's according to the recent report from GitHyp. But what's interesting is that despite Uplay keys being more widely available, and often around 20% cheaper, Steam still had the lion share of purchases. This is known to most players on PC, of course. The game is also sold on Steam, but unlike Steamworks games, the keys you buy from retailers can't be redeemed on Steam. The PC version of For Honor is available at many online stores, as a digital Uplay code. The Steam player base in For Honor makes up over half of the game's total population on PC.
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