The number of D4 which we’re provided is skewed. What SteamDB shows is the concurrent currently online playercount.
What Blizzard provides is total individual logins (If unique logins or simply login presses is also not declared) instead. It’s a basic way for companies to buff their numbers and make them look bigger then they actually are.
Basically what you need to do is take the peak concurrent playercount of a day in a game and multiply it by ~5 to the the individual player count for the day.
Worse so if it’s login presses simply, then it’s a little bit higher even.
Agreed, and that’s a major problem for LE. Market positioning of EHG is bad, they didn’t know which position to take, tried to slip into the position of ‘PoE but a bit more casual’ and dropped the ball according to that position simply, because it’s a brutal one, a very brutal one to be in.
You’re completely right that D4 is not competing for the same people, neither is Grim Dawn (which is a off-season game for many), TL:I (Which focuses primarily on mobile but actually provides a good overall game surprisingly), Undecember (which just disgruntled all player and has none hence 
) or even PoE 2 (which is competing for PoE player but those enjoying a alternative style simply while pulling in newcomers because of less complexity, directly what LE tried to do).
It’s because EHG shoved themselves in the place they did. They always were compared to PoE while developing and they never ensured to detach themselves… so now they’re in a direct competition with em.
Individuals or concurrent online players?
Because GGG also has millions of players in Europe. And even TL:I has hundreds of thousands.
Individual players is a surprisingly awful metric of success… because those individuals could play once a month… or 8 hours per day, and respectively be spending accordingly as play-time correlates - to a degree - with spending.
Yes, it’s a more casual game, which has a different target audience. The major reason why a monolith like Diablo functions despite dropping the ball so majorly… no other developer provided a extensive halfway decent looking casual long-term ARPG. While PoE provides the complete other side of the scale, high engagement long-term intense progression.
They’re polar opposites of the same genre, which makes both extremely important to exist… or rather which opens the gate for a developer to provide a game ‘similarly casual but content dense as D4’… which isn’t overly hard to achieve actually as the variety of content in D4 is highly inflated by repetitive use of assets. Still a large project to make something similar but possible at least.
But any competition with PoE without a decade long catch-up setup? Nigh impossible because of the sheer content density.
You also don’t compete with the playstyle of Dwarf Fortress in city builders or fail, dozens tried, all failed. You use another way of engagement instead like Rimworld, Timberborn, Frostpunk or whatever else is out there currently and working.
That is a fallacy actually. GGG knows very well that PoE 1 and PoE 2 have a different customer base. A large portion of non-streamers don’t play both, they focus on one. And despite the existence of each other the both fare more then well.
Unless player numbers drop substantially (below 20k peak or so) it’s a hefty incentive business wise to upkeep their model as it is currently.
They tried to make both teams work on the respective other game for the beginning, it backfired greatly.
Since then they’ve returned all the developers to PoE 1 as it was before, without cross-development being in the focus.
That’s the newest situation we know of.
There were bad signs shown but they backpedaled properly, kudos to them. The future will show if it upholds.
Also size-wise the PoE 1 community gets a surprisingly large amount of content despite overlapping releases with PoE 2. If the focus were on PoE 2 so heavily then PoE 1 wouldn’t get the Legend of Phrexia event which is balance-wise completely overhauled from the last time. While repeated content it’s still a massive balancing amount which we’ve seen less of in over a year from EHG comparatively. That alone shows the sheer scale of resources being used in PoE 1 still.
They’re trying the same business model as ‘Jagex’ does with Runescape. It’s a functioning one where one struggling and badly managed game can sustain long-term because of the other, allowing individual risks to be taken without putting everything into a single card.
It’s a winning model unlike what AAA companies with their ‘all in’ approach comparably does, nigh universally failing because of it.