I’m gonna say PoE is not a good example. It is the game very few casual players actually play lol I don’t know of a single casual player that actually likes Poe.
I think you and I are talking about two different casual players.
I’m not talking about a casual audience of a “certain” game. Like every game has its hardcore followers (the ones who play said game non stop or push to the highest competitive aspect of it,) or the casual followers (the ones who play it a few hours a week or so.) I’m talking about the overall casual audience of gaming in general. The ones who for every game out there never plays a game competitively, never follows streamers, never goes on forums, they just play what they want to play when they want to. My wife is that person. She never goes on forums, never looks at streamers of the games she plays, never looks up guides, doesn’t follow any community of a game to know what the community thinks of a game.
For instance if she was to go on forums about arpgs she would see two things. The “D4 bad Andys’” and PoE is the greatest arpg of all time. If she based her view off of that then she would think d4 is bad and Poe must be good. Well turns out the “d4 bad Andys” are just a very small, but vocal community. And she instantly hated Poe within her first 5 minutes of playing,
Casual players make up the majority of players throughout the world. There is no denying that.
If PoE isn’t a good example because few casuals play it, then D3 isn’t a good example because few hardcores play it. They’re on opposite sides of the spectrum in that regard.
Only within the actual playerbase of D4, which is comprised mostly of former D3 fans.
The “Andys” are mostly just D2-like players (most now in PoE) which tried D4, thought it was bad (which it was, for their playstyle) and haven’t returned.
That depends on your definition of casual, yes. Not going on forums or looking at streamers as nothing to do with it, IMO. Casual just means they play less time per day/overall. Hardcore players can also not look at streamers or even check the forums, other than for patch notes.
If you play 10h a day every day you’re a hardcore player, if you play 10h a week you’re a casual. Where you draw the line between those distinctions is up for debate.
So, casual players make up the majority of players throughout the world. Yes, that is true. But they don’t make up the majority of seasonal live service games. And that is an important distinction.
The amount of time you put in playing games is irrelevant when it comes down to hardcore or casual. My wife just put in 15 hours in stardew valley the last two days and she’s as casual as it comes lol gaming length is a terrible measurement of someone who is hardcore or casual. IMO if you are hardcore or casual is by what are you trying to get out of the game.
Are you someone that try’s to get 100% achievements out of the game. Someone who theorycrafts. Tries to push the highest spot in the ladder. Tries to be world first. Spends time learning about every mechanic in the game and how to “beat” them. Pushing to win tournaments. Being super competitive. Those are what makes up a hardcore player.
A casual player can put in around the same amount of time investment and not be interested in any of that stuff. They just play for fun. They don’t play to be the best. They don’t learn how mechanics work. Not competitive at all.
There are millions of wow players who never once raid, never pvp, never do mythic plus. They just do outdoor content, they role play with other players, they farm old raids for transmogs and mounts, participate in holiday events. But they put in around the same amount of time as “hardcore” gamers.
We’ll just agree to disagree then. We have different definitions of it so we’re talking about 2 different view points.
And, IMO, the definition is different if you’re referring to single player, multiplayer and seasonal multiplayer.
Either way, we have sidetracked this long enough, since it’s not really relevant to the OP anymore
You are delusional. It is bigger and more popular by any metric available. The fact that you personally prefer d4 does not mean its a more popular game. I couldn’t care less about poe but it is weird to deny the obvious.
What does me liking d4 have to do with how popular a game is? That’s kind of a weird thing to say lol
But if we go off metrics. D4 sold over 10 million copies in its first week. Obviously that number is much bigger now. LE sold a million copies on its release. LE peaked at 258k. So I would assume with d4 selling over 10 mil d4 probably peaked at a number ten times that of LE. Poe’s recent season was beyond hyped. Especially with people liking LE you would think PoE would have a massive player count for its latest season. PoE peaked this season with 187k. And Poe’s lifetime peak was 209k.
Since blizzard doesn’t release player counts we will never have actual metrics besides sales. And if we go off a sales d4 sales are massively greater than either. So it’s safe to assume there are definitely a ton of those players who bought the game are still playing. More than likely they keep above 100k daily players.
Mostly true of my friends. I am hardcore, i would say. I not clearing 3000 corruption, i am clearing 250 corruption on builds that everyone have a consenus are useless, but i am trying to make them work. So i think your right for most, but there are strange cases like myself- albeit a rare outlier so maybe not most applicable
This is from steamcharts, which does not contain the whole playerbase, since most people use their client. If you want to compare using only steamcharts, then you should use it for D4 as well. Which would give you 28k peak players.
Both games don’t release player count, so you can’t really tell how many are playing from steamcharts alone.
A few years ago Chris said that user distribution was about 50/50 or 60/40. I don’t know how much it has changed since then, but I don’t expect numbers to have changed too much in that regard.
So if it’s around 50/50 then it’s fairly evenly split & saying “most people” use one or the other could be a bit of a stretch (given what the split is).
Yes, that was me not expressing myself correctly. I should have simply said a significant part.
Either way, the point was that there’s no real way to know the real number of players on both D4 and PoE. We can extrapolate trends (like player retention decay rate), but not get any real numbers.
EDIT: This is even more true because D4 is bought and PoE is free, so we can’t even compare sales numbers.
But if we would try to extrapolate any data about d4, sales is the only number we can use for d4. Steam charts are the only thing we can use for Poe and last epoch. And the only sales number for d4 are from last year when they said within 5 days they sold over $666 million which would be just under 10 million copies. I would guess by now that number is around 20 million copies. So even if only 10% of those who bought it are still playing would still be 2 million players. I would assume more like 20%, but 10% is a better number for error and what not.
Now with net ease and blizzard getting a deal done the China market is going to have massive number growths for their games.
But anyways. No we can’t get any real concrete information. But that’s really the best we can do.
Edit - when I say 2 million players I don’t mean 2 million daily players. Now that is possible, but probably not. Probably more like 20-40% of that number would be closer to the daily count
I would argue that 20M sold by now is generous, since the big bump in sales happened on release and it tends to fall out since then.
However, your other numbers are pretty conservative, so I’d assume that D4 should at least be competitive with PoE. Although D4 does have another nuance, in that I believe that the percentage of non-season players is much higher than in PoE.
Anyway, without real numbers (which none of them release) it’s hard to actually know.
Also, in my opinion, it doesn’t make much sense to compare them. They’re 2 very different games that target opposite types of players. I doubt there are many players that enjoy both games, at least on a regular basis.
Personally, I think they’re both good games for what they propose to do, even though I don’t really plan on playing either anytime soon. D4 is still growing and trying to decide exactly what it wants to be and PoE is mostly just deciding what they want to do with their last leagues, whether go all out on broken stuff or not. But I think they’re both successful in their objectives.
I only say 20 million because d3 sold over 30 million copies by 2015. I would assume d4 would follow a similar path and probably quicker. But who knows lol
And yeah I’m not comparing them. I said to that other guy that Poe is more popular with more veteran arpg players. But that d4 probably has a higher player count. Only because Diablo has the biggest following in the arpg space. But because d4 might have a higher player count, doesn’t make it better. Poe has the veteran players, while d4 has the casual players. None is better than the other. But because Diablo is a triple A game from a massively known company it just makes sense that it would probably have more players overall.
As usual, you come here just to spread misinformation (and negativity). The devs never said that. They said there will be no cycle-exclusive content until 1.2 (which is half a year, not years).
