Profile of Hannibal

Steam has grown a lot, I am looking a the headlines "Steam Tops 7 million users online" in 2013, and today it is 33m online.

The 10-20k concurrent playerbase game was a smashing success in the 2013, and now it might not even be the top 100.

Yes, this is definitely a good point. But you also cannot expect linear growth. Both Steam and the gaming market have changed drastically since then. In 2013 Steam had roughly 2500 games on the store. Last year alone they released almost 11000 (mostly trash games I guess) spreading the overall players over more games, and strategy games have generally fallen behind in public favor. It's hard to conclude that a game has failed in some way because it only surpassed its predecessor by X%.

CoH3 surely does not have the impact on the gaming market that the first two games had. It also does not have to to be financially viable.
If we take AoE4 as a rough benchmark (highly advertised, and despite not much novelty it got favourable reviews both by critics as well as on steam and metacritic), CoH3 seems to be roughly half of that. Probably not great, but not bad either for competing with what is probably the largest strategy franchise. CoH2's numbers are surpassed a lot. If Relic managed to financially survive on CoH2, they might manage to survive on CoH3 as well unless they heavily increased their spending (which I do not have any insight about).

The game started at a peak of around 30k players. Now it is down to around 14k on the weekend. 12k during the week. By this coming Wednesday we could be seeing below 10k players.

I hoped for a much better start. And at a minimum have the numbers keep going up, not down.

As Aerafield said, maybe the single player people played it and left. Maybe the numbers will gradually increase as players become used to the game and venture into MP. Or maybe when the price drops, people will try it out and stay. Hopefully Relic has the bugs worked out by then.

All I know is, if I was a manager at Relic and saw this I would not be happy. Crap reviews even by people who love the series and never have anything bad to say, player base starting small and dying fast... I would be sending out resumes fast because my dismissal is right around the corner.

I am starting to see longtime Coh2 MP players saying they uninstalled Coh3 already.

Streamers are sticking to Coh3 still. So that is a positive sign. It is the future of the game for sure, so that makes sense they would.

What you fail to show is that this is an all in all pretty normal chart. Almost every game has most players at release and retains only a quarter or a third within 1-2 months.
Steamdb is down for me and steamcharts does not have the resolution at the respective releases. But from what I remember, CoH2 was down to about a third of the players at release after a good month or so, AoE4 as well iirc. Look at all the Total war games, that are much more focused on replayability and SP campaigns. They all drop the same.

If you compare the peaks of CoH3 from a day to day basis, there's not a huge efflux anymore. Numbers still go down, but not that I'd expect the game to be dead soon. We'll see what happens after this weekend, usually people play a lot on the weekend and then drop a game because they start finding it boring or move on, so let's see what happens for the next two or three days.

I don't get the talk about player numbers at the moment.
CoH3 is doing fine in that regard. Player numbers at release almost doubled compared to CoH2, and the community is rather one that sticks around and revisits the game, especially since there is not much competition in the CoH niche.
Losing most of the players in the first month is normal. CoH3's player loss is nothing exceptional. CoH2 went down to a third within a month and that level kept lingering for the next 10 years.
It is quite interesting that CoH3 does not seem to have taken many players from CoH2. Relic seems to have achieved their goal of opening up to a larger audience rather than only catering to the current one. One thing that is interesting, but will be impossible to find out is how the players distribute between SP and MP. CoH3's SP is vastly improved, so a higher proportion will play SP only. I guess we therefore can't fully compare CoH2's current player count with CoH3's current player count and make a solid conclusion of the healthiness of the MP.

I also don't see anymore that CoH2 will die. Player numbers here have taken only a minor dent. Yes, players will transition if CoH3 improves over the next months, but I don't see CoH2 being a dead game anytime soon. It will keep its own base, probably even a larger one than CoH1.

I'll break it down point by point. Bear in mind, if I'll mention steam reviews I don't mean the ones that just consist of "it's good/bad lol", but at least mention a couple of points why they gave a thumps up or down.

1. Why on earth do people constantly harp on about minor unfinished/sloppy elements of the game like icons, weapon symbols and faction flags. I saw someone on reddit declare that usage of old icons to be "UNACCEPTABLE" and the primary reason he gave a negative review. In one of the youtube reviews the guy demonstrates how he can recreate the faction symbols in 5 minutes in photoshop. He literally spends more time on this tangent than he does talking about gameplay. How dense do you have to be to completely ignore the actual GAME. You know ... the part that matters. If you dislike the gameplay we can agree to disagree. But to just brush over it and complain about the menu art instead is just infuriating.

They do, because the game is not finished to a an extend that you should expect from a release. Since it overall works as a game, but has just so many smaller rough edges, you'll have to list those rough edges. I it is not only the icons, but the sum of all the issues. And the icons are one where it is just strikingly obvious that Relic cheaped out or misplanned or whatever, especially because they are rather quick and easy to do. Yet, Relic did not fix them.

2. Why do people who are guaranteed to play the game for thousands of hours and basically have CoH as a mainstay hobby give negative reviews? Steam reviews primarily communicate to the general public. If someone unfamiliar with CoH comes across the newest iteration and sees shit reviews they will likely never get into the series. I have a hardcore CoH2 1v1 player in my friendlist that has like 4000 hours in the game and still has a negative review complaining about balance issues. Why? How does that make sense? So many people don't even know CoH or are only vaguely familiar with it. And in my experience almost everybody you show and explain the game to ends up liking it. So why scare off that crowd just because of your own agenda?

For your example regarding your friend, I fully agree with you. For CoH3, no one is guaranteed to play thousands of hours. They played maybe 10, 20, 30 hours, they're free to give a negative review.

3. Why do people completely neglect the strong aspects of CoH3? Doesn't the fact that we have 4 factions and amazing performance make up for some of the shortcomings? Isn't having 4 factions upon release preferable over having a super polished game in terms of interface and multiplayer functionality? Maybe not, but then it would be more of a case of relic being overly ambitious in their desire to provide a lot of bang for your buck. No one would have complained if it was just two factions at release, but they went the extra mile and maybe that cost us polish.

A steam review is not a journalistic piece, but from your points I get the feeling that you kind of expect everyone to list pros and cons. That would obviously be desirable, but the casual nature of steam reviews lends itself to players either giving a positive or negative review and then just writing why they chose what they chose. This goes both ways, you'll also find many positive reviews just writing positive things. Overall, I don't see your point here. It's ordinary steam reviews, nothing special.

4. A bigger playerbase would be so cool, but people actively prevent this from happening by shitting on the game. And I absolutely loathe the high and mighty do-gooder argument that this needs to be done because the gaming industry deserves a lesson about early releases. This is after relic already delayed the game and it is obvious that they ran out of options. Of course the same people would also agree that working conditions in the gaming industry are horrible and that pre release crunch should be avoided.

With the amount of stuff missing and place holders in the game, Relic heavily misplanned. That's an error of the management, nothing else. The original release date of November is a testimony to this. They should have either opted for a smaller game or delayed for longer. They might have been under financial pressure. But then again, their business decisions are none of my business, and I can't know either. I can only judge their product, which they put out to the public and labelled as "finished" for their release.
Seeing CoH3 as an unfinished product that should have gotten more polishing before release is fair critique. Blaming the critics for the small player base is unfairly shifting the blame. It's Relic's responsibility to fix their own product and ensure longevity, not the customer's responsibility to neglect problems so that more people buy the product.

5. Anyone german who gave a negative review because there is no german voice acting needs to seriously ask themselves if they would actually NOT RECOMMEND CoH to someone new for that reason. Is that really sufficient to make CoH3 a bad game? REALLY? The average German's english is light years behind the Dutch or Scandinavians so maybe it's time that we stop putting our own voice acting over everything?

I personally find these types of critique petty as well. German however has quite a large base of native speakers that are also used to audio synchronization. Many other games provide that service, CoH3 doesn't. It might tie in to all the other aspects showing that CoH3 has been rushed. It's stupid to base your whole review on it. But then again, there's also a lot of positive reviews with no substance, and I don't see you complaining about those.

Overall, your thread mostly reads like your new favourite game is being criticized partially unfairly and you want to rant about it. You can do this for sure, but if you want higher quality reviews, then maybe don't read the ones on steam. In steam's system, you're expected to read multiple reviews and distill out the essence yourself, otherwise it does not work at all. You're trying to shoot the messenger, not the one responsible for the message.

You could make this argument in favour of abolishing the tact map though right? It also helps you in 'realizing where and when your opponent probes and pushes'. Ultimately these QOL changes in effect are productivity tools and which, while making your life easier in some regards, free your mental resources up to concentrate elsewhere. Auto reinforce is another good example.

Its not a hill I would die on though, I'd much prefer to see the control groups functionality, selector and events functionality fleshed out.

There's a lot of aspects - some already implemented - that go either way. I don't share your comparison to the tac map or auto reinforcing. The 'mechanics' and impact are just too different. The mini map does not show you new info, it is just an overview of what is going on. It reduces the micro of needing to skip to three different positions on the battlefield to get all the info and lets you focus on overall unit movement. The auto reinforcement reduces mindless clicking. In short, they both reduce things that I would not call a core feature of RTS games and free up time for the core loop itself.

Marking and tracking units however is different. I see this as a core mental part of RTS: Being able to estimate the enemy's strength in a position, weak points, how far you can push etc. Because this info directly influences your decisions, movement and positioning. Auto reinforcement and having a mini map do not change the core gameplay, they remove tedious tasks.

There is a point however that I think is much closer: Being able to see which player controls each unit, as well as stats like the aforementioned veterancy status. These also allow you some form of unit tracking. However, e.g. being able to see the enemy's vet vastly reduces frustration and imprpves readability, because the vet provides an explanation how the fight plays out. You could argue that you should not be able to see who the unit belongs to, since you'd then need to figure out yourself by sheer unit presence if you're beingteamed up on or not. Technically, it would be good for gameplay, but not fair for mixed teams, since teaming up on one single player would be obvious by the units you see.

That would be closer to ypur original point. However, just like for yout would not be a major point of discontent for me, but I weight the downsides heavier than the advantages.

I am slightly disappointed to see that they did not expand the range of target sizes, but still use roughly the same scaling as in CoH2.
Together with similar accuracy values, the compressed range will make it more difficult to differentiate between some of the vehicle classes.

*The range stats for the Tiger & Panther appear to be bugged at the moment. The values for the Far/Mid/Near ranges are all set to "-1" which defaults them to the maximum range of the weapon. This results in both tanks using their maximum penetration values across their entire ranges.

That's also a classic Relic move