Which goalposts?
Don’t be utterly incompetent now. You can’t throw around terms willy nilly to try and underline your argument which is based on lofty nothingness.
‘Substantially’ includes it already.
Once more, your comprehension.
Consecutively online, which you multiply by roughly 4-6 times for the actual individual playercount.
Which is why the player numbers of D4 always seem so huge when anything is revealed, they use daily individual players, not concurrent numbers.
Yes, obviously.
Now I know you’ll immediately go absolutely ham after those 2 words above, but keep your brain turned on for a few moments longer:
First off, 50% of players don’t make it past Act 1, hence we’ve already a different percentile.
Actually… expected around 70-80% of players won’t have even the campaign finished, ever.
Then from the leftover 20% we get around 50-60% into empowered.
And from those around 30-40% (purely estimated by now as the former numbers skew it heavily) will beat Aberroth… and from those around 5-10% at best Uberroth.
If we take a normal long-term game distribution here.
From the long-term players (which are between 5-10% of the total playerbase for this genre, those reaching beyond 100 hours total playtime invested) we’ll see roughly 10% being ‘forever’ players of some sort, those which actually do spend intense amounts of time. The so-called ‘1%’ which is often talked about.
Those are further split into 2 core categories. The single-character players and the ones which are altoholics. Few are purely in one category, the majority leans simply into one direction, more or less severely.
We can commonly start to take into serious (hence not solely glancing over it to see if a rough point at least is being made) consideration the mechanical feedback for those which fall into the ‘long-term player’. This is around the ‘Sigma 2’ category. So going into it in detail:
Yes, called ‘Sigma’, hence ‘Sigma 1’, ‘Sigma 2’ and ‘Sigma 3’.
The following also applies still:
So far so good.
But then it falls apart:
And that’s where you’re failing this example actually!
You gotta realize one thing here… first off, the long-term player by definition is not the ‘average joe’. Never was, never will be.
The long-term player is the type of player keeping the lights on.
Since the long-term player provides the funds needed you cannot ignore them, quite the contrary.
If it were a consumable product with repeated usage you would be right, but a long-term service is not a consumable which is used up. It’s a repeated increase of steady payments into it.
As you state yourself… per normal distribution we can start with the ‘Sigma 2’ area for viable longevity in live-service products. You might not like it but it’s how those games are mandatory to be designed.
A proper live-service design is based upon including those below the ‘Sigma 2’ area just enough to keep them coming back, to provide a large area of social environment for the leftover 5% above, they ‘leech’ off of their state via comparison to be exact. Be it via a market, social standing in perception of success comparatively… that’s the norm.
Once more… you might not like it but it’s how the human psyche works.
Those 5% past the Sigma 2 distribution though are those which actually matter. They provide 95% of the revenue for the company outside of shelf-price, which for a live-service game is mandatory. Shelf-price doesn’t matter. You don’t have endless people providing that. Only ~15 games world wide in the history of gaming have sold enough copies to sustain a live-service concept of this size with solely shelf-price. And none of them is a live-service game.
Which brings us to the next aspect, the middle of the curve.
Do you actually understand who the middle is? The absolute average joe in reality? I stated it above, but it’s so important to repeat it clearly:
50% of players owning a product won’t make it past the first 2 hours of game-time, inconsequential which game it is.
Now my question:
Are you actually stating that we should design the game around those? We should take ‘Sigma 0,5’ into consideration?
That would be insanity.
So we can go to ‘Sigma 1’, right?
68% of people.
Who are they exactly?
Commonly between 20-30% finish the timeframe needed for the campaign, hence those are the people which haven’t even gone beyond Lagon… or Majasa.
Obviously not feasable either to design the game for those, live-service tourists.
So you reach towards ‘Sigma 2’ for decisions commonly.
Now now though… you got definitely a point still!
Obviously not!
But you fail to see the world in anything but ‘it is’ or ‘it isn’t’.
Black&White thinking doesn’t help here, we need to be a bit more refined then that.
The less experience the less expectation of value.
What does that mean exactly?
That someone with less experience can provide a reasonable point, but the chance for it to happen drops substantially in scope and for the areas they can provide it.
Hence you’re absolutely right, you take in the considerations of those people! But only for the respective areas they can reasonably provide it.
And that’s it.
That was - and is - the whole argumentation line which has been said.
What you do is trying to argue for the ‘average joe’… but tell you what… the average joe is actually worthless for a live-service company. And I mean that literally.
