TBF Grim dawn just had a patch and a community playtest(where they were taking player feedback on changes) before it so there’s a bit of a resurgence right now. Also a massive discount from Steam Winter sale bringing in a bunch of new players who may have come from playing PoE2 (mainly) /D4/LE.
You mean retention rate? Kinda what you expect from a seasonal ARPG. Even though there really weren’t as many (barely any) options on the downtime as there now.
Unless the next season flops or something completely, I don’t see them running out of those 2-3 years of money. They’re taking their time to fix and implement new content instead of half-assing everything, that’s fine with me. I’ll play next season even if I’m not playing right now. I rotate games.
If your live service game has less active players on steam than a paid expansion model game, you have completely failed and need to immediately sounding alarms at your company and doing a 180 to fix everything.
You don’t chose a seasonal model, then “take your time to release things”.
The industry standard for seasonal ARPGs is 3 months between seasons, if you do not meet that, you will not have a game.
No, burn rate is how fast you’re working through your cash, though it’s only useful if you know how much cash they have (which we don’t 'cause I think the $30m is lifetime sales).
Have you not experienced Path of Exile? They fucked up their leagues twice this year.
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How so?
Honestly, compare a game at the start that should act perfectly to retain its player base with constant update with a game that’s live for over 10 years, and where a lot of the team is working on Poe2 isn’t the example that I would made to compare the two situation
The cadence is supposed to be a new league every 3 months. Settlers league took 6 months to come out. The next league also got delayed by an additional 3 months and they had to rerun the settlers league again in the mean time. This is NOT the first time this has happened. GGG does not have a good track record in keeping to the 3 month cadence they try to extol.
So I realy wanted LE to be a fun game I enjoy because who in his right mind don’t want fun and enjoyable games.
The sad part is to me it’s neither right now. If this is what the devs had in mind when they wanted a passion product from players for players then something is off. The balance changes are meh, the game was slow and repetetive and the changes that introduced boss damage resistence or the dreadfull ward bandaid they implemented was to much for me to bare.
At one point in time I wasn’t able to choose what of the fun builds I start playing first and over time I got less and less exited to play anything offered because while there was a skilltree for each skill the skills are still rather bland and their function wasn’t changing much. I even give up to see missing skills implemented that could spice things up because LE has a new construction site again and again and again that hinders the development and makes the game feel like a flip book with only 3 pages.
I still hope for the best but for my personal taste right now LE is a 3/10 I can’t reccomend to anyone because even D2 Baal runs seem more refreshing then playing LE.
Then again I’m happy for everyone who has a good time with LE and I see no reason to fight over taste in video games. We will most likely not reach a conclusion why LE performes as bad as it does because it’s hard to stay objective for the most people when they love or hate something and far inbetween.
I’m sure that has nothing to do with their massive Steam Winter Sale discount on top of their latest balancing/fix patch. GD with a decade of expansionsis now for sale for only 29,5 bucks and it’s only 2,49 to try the base game. Perfect for people waiting out to the new LE patch, or PoE or D4 or whatever fancies you. (In comparison: even Wolcen still charges 4,99 for an officially dead game)
Grim Dawn released in 2016, 4y after D3 & Torchlight 2, while PoE existed, it was still in its “do campaign 3x” phase. It had almost no competition at the time. It had 15206 peak players at launch. Last Epoch had 258503, which 1 player more than literally 17x GD. All while D4 was recent, PoE exists as solid competition, …
The last big content patch for GD was in November 2023, more than a year ago now. That 1.2.0 patch brought in no more than double the players, tapering back down after 3 months.
Last epoch’s 1.1 patch got atleast 10x the players back from the month before.
Plus, the real world has changed a lot in those 8 years. While 2020 was a good year for video gaming industry, it dipped back down in 2022 and has been growing slower than pre-lockdown since then. GD was released in an environment where there was still more global economic growth and the market penetration was not yet leveling off.
And I’m sure there’s a bunch more statistics I could bring.
But none of that matters as much as this:
If the game truly is as failed and dead as you claim it to be, you wouldn’t actually be on these forums.
The sky isn’t falling, it’s just some rain.
I come come every once in a while and see if the game has been fixed, then I see the same “zero difficulty in the campaign” complaints I saw at release and give up.
Small correction: PoE released in 2013. So 3 years before GD. 2016 was when they started growing more noticeably, especially after the Atlas expansion.
You’re correct, apparently I was looking at the Xbox release, which was same year they got rid of having to run the campaign 3 times (imagine the complaints if that was in LE, it’s already a cryfest!)
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