Profile of wuff

Jump back to quoted post21 Apr 2015, 12:52 PMLegioxRoma

current player count by steam :

Jump back to quoted post20 Apr 2015, 17:34 PMInverse

Sure, that's a possibility. But when we look at sequels to games that resulted in larger and healthier competitive communities than their predecessors (see SC2, Dota 2, CSGO), the growth of those games corresponded with major growth in the forum hubs of their competitive scenes (TeamLiquid, HLTV.org, Dota's various communities and the new ones that popped up after its success). Those forums grew exponentially alongside the growth of their respective games. The fact that it happened not once, not twice, but three times with three separate games is pretty compelling evidence that people aren't simply replacing forum usage with other mediums.

Compare that growth to the community situation for CoH2. The GR CoH2 portal is essentially nonexistent. The daily active membership on COH2.ORG is a fraction of what the GR CoH1 portal enjoyed. There were regularly 800-900 concurrent users browsing the GR CoH1 portal before CoH2's release; the most concurrent users ever on COH2.ORG is 775.

These other games have more popular streamers with more viewers, better observer functions, and more penetration of services like YouTube. Yet in each and every instance, rather than shrinking like your hypothesis would suggest, growth of these games' competitive scenes correlated with growth of their main forum hubs for competitive play. Looking at forum activity and member numbers, CoH's forum hub for competitive play has shrunk since CoH2's release. It doesn't instill much confidence in the strength of CoH2's competitive scene.

Jump back to quoted post20 Apr 2015, 18:30 PMInverse

The thing is, in the case of SC2 and Dota 2, those communities never shrunk. The rate at which they grew is of course going to be related in some way to the rate at which the games themselves grew, but the competitive communities never shrank. CSGO's community, on the other hand, was tiny until Valve took it over and finally fixed some of its major design problems.

CoH2 is taking the CSGO trajectory much more so than the SC2 or Dota 2 trajectories, except Relic hasn't shown any willingness to reconsider problematic core design decisions like Valve did when they took over CSGO. Without Valve's intervention, that game would've died a long time ago.

As for comparisons to CoH1, I feel it's totally fair because failing to retain your most dedicated player base in your sequel is a major failure for a multiplayer game. If CoH2 were at least as compelling competitively as CoH1 was, there is absolutely zero reason that the game could not have at the very least maintained its numbers. But that didn't happen, and now the competitive CoH1 and competitive CoH2 communities are almost entirely segregated in terms of who has played which game at a high level. In SC2, Dota 2, and to a lesser extent CSGO there's a large amount of overlap between the different versions of the games; in CoH2 there's almost zero.

Jump back to quoted post18 Apr 2015, 15:31 PMInverse

It wouldn't have made a difference relative to those titles, but the game still would've had a better competitive scene than CoH2 does now, because CoH1's design is more conducive to competitive play than CoH2's is. CoH2's competitive scene is nearly non-existent.