We need to stop this or everything will go wrong.

Personally, I use http://store.steampowered.com/stats/?snr=1_steam_4__110 to judge the interest people have in Starbound. It's pretty good, since it can be compared against other games. Suffice to say, the amount of people playing is dropping quickly.

This is really my main point of concern, that people have just lost interest, and are losing interest. I've already posted about the rest of this topic here.

 

I'm using this one, which was posted by a user two moths ago. Needless to say that I didn't play Starbound for two months, until I returned last week. It's quite of disappointing for a user to see that nothing changed in an absence of two months.

Judging from the statistics, we can see that the first "crash" happened in mid-December, but that can have different motives: Christmas, vacation, and also the normal desinterest of Steam-users after they played the game for two weeks. Much more interesting is the new interest in Starbound by end-January, beginning February, when the last REAL update (Furious Koala, which also included a character wipe) happened. It shows that there was still an interested base, waiting for some news. After that, the graph goes down and down, until it reaches the value which we have now, since the beginning of March.

I don't want to get involved too much in this topic. But it clearly shows that there is no silent majority. The majority left Starbound. The "yelling people" are only the ones who are still interested to talk about that. It will be interesting if we see a new rising graph with the next update, and if it has at least the same amount of players like it had in February.

 

Thanks for the link, I'll keep that bookmarked. But yes, I haven't really got much else to add, you kind of hit the nail square on the head, there is no silent majority anymore.

 

This is inaccurate. This is not simply a matter of "1% of the community."

This is not hard to figure out yourself: If a portion of the visible community holds a certain belief, and there is no observable reason why their views should be different from the silent majority, then the likelihood of the silent majority sharing their position or at least being affected by the things that caused them to take that position is high.*1

There is an actual problem. Starbound was the second most played game on steam at launch and has since steadily dropped down to the second page of Steam Charts.*2 Meanwhile, Terraria holds a steady 10-20K players on the front page. Minecraft is... Well, we can't see their numbers clearly, but Minecraft is Minecraft. We *should* be holding a higher, more steady place here, but we're not. Blame what you want, a lack of updates, a lack of content, a foundation that still needs work, whatever.

This isn't a matter of them taking the forums too seriously, this is a matter of them trying pretty damn hard, not doing as well as they should despite this, and then turning around to find their community a conflicted, angry mess. If you want to talk about frustrating, this is it. I'm obviously not saying they're free of any mistakes themselves, but it's very understandable why one would get hair pulling over this.

*1 The only time the loud minority wont mirror the larger majority in some fashion is when the delivery method of their message somehow taints the sample (raise your hand if the word "lobbyist" popped into your head just now). In game forums, a classic example of this is difficulty, no matter how hard or easy your game is you'll almost universally find people on forums complaining it's too easy the most consistently, whereas complaints of it being too hard typically only come after a difficulty spike is introduced. The reason for this is forums tend to be frequented by people with some kind of drive, which is to say people who are dedicated players of the game (and thus are probably better at it), or alternatively, have been frustrated enough by it to actually bother posting there. In relevance to Starbound, we don't see inaccuracies of views as much as we see an accelerated timeline: The people who have posted that they are displeased with the frequency of updates are likely more dedicated or otherwise invested players who have played more, and thus we see a projection of what's to come as more and more people catch up to them.

*2 3-4000ish players isn't too bad, but to settle on "moderate success" is to waste potential in this case. Not a lot of indie games get to claim "we hit 80k players on Steam at launch," Starbound really should be holding a place in the top 20 if not top 10. The faster Chucklefish can get stuff rolling again, the better our retention is going to be.

 

What we're seeing though is people with hundreds of hours, dissuading people to buy the game because of their poor experience. Now, I'm not sure how much weight those people have, but I for one always check the community of any steam early access game before buying specifically to see how frequent the updates are, and whether it is dead or not.

 

Oh I meant more Steam community, and "actual" updates, that is to say, updates to the game itself and the content. Sorry should have specified, but yeah, similar things.

 

You can discuss the game's mechanics in general discussion, sure (and people do). But if you're making a formal suggestion, then that would go in the suggestions forum. Unless I'm not following you 100%.

 

Why should EA recieve hate for a game that isn't theirs? Seems weird.
I forgave them, I like the game .

 

I personally have 7 friends that have Starbound and all of them are dissatisfied with the lack of updates and haven't touched the game in a long time - none of them frequent these forums. Just because people don't post here doesn't mean that there's a "silent happily playing majority" out there. You take things for granted.

 

im going to be absolutely serious with this

Starbound died after the last update. i say it died because it isnt the starbound i played, and it also isnt being steadily updated. until i get concrete evidence that the game is still in development, i will not be playing this game. it just isnt worth my time. i gave them my money, i dont care what they do now. even if this game rises from the dead, what then? there isnt anything left for this game. i dont see some of the things that were confirmed to be in the game in the game yet. I will let them get to the point where CF thinks the game is "done" though it probably wont be, then i will make my final observation on it. i had such high hopes for this game

 

Red 5 revival.

I come here to watch people attack each other. The sincerity of the angry is refreshing. The quite backhanded attempts to make any criticism seem as if it's coming from an mentally unhealthy or immature person is absolute sociopathy. Once again the nice ones are generally the devils.

Not as clever as you thin' you are.

369 divers, 925 lifers.

 

Ah well, gotta remain positive or fall into the pit of despair with the albino

 

It's probably safe to say that the majority fall under the "waiting/lost interest" stage. Losing interest and moving on from the game's current state doesn't mean that it won't explode again once huge updates are in. We see this every time Terraria releases a big update. Latest evidence from last Thursday. People moved on and the game died down significantly. But now with the update it's the number 9 most played game on Steam with 17k players. I myself fall under this stage. I was very active on the forums and logged a lot of hours. Then I moved on, as there was nothing new to experience. Once in awhile I poke my head in to see where things are, but I'm still every bit as excited to play the heck out of full release as I ever was.

That said, I do know a couple people who have lost interest completely. Which is one of the downfalls of early access. They can't get their head around the fact what they played isn't going to be anything like what Starbound will eventually be. They can't wrap their mind around all the placeholder gameplay. Sadly, the early access first impression is stamped in their mind. Hopefully I'll at least get them to give it a shot, as most of the gameplay will be unrecognizable. I can see how quite a few of those sales will fall under this category. First impressions are everything, especially to people who aren't hardcore enough to keep up on the development news.

 

Well, the customers paid. There is no need to convert them to the real Starbound religion, only because they are too ignorant to understand the brilliant game policiy Chucklefish makes. Don't get me wrong. I agree with you. In the world of books, a manuscript is burned. That happened to Starbound. I'm not an usual Steam member and I don't take part in discussions there for many different reasons. But when I checked the Steam forum the first time a week ago, I got the impression that the members over there are warning other people to buy Starbound. That's the worst thing which can happen. But instead that someone deals with that problem, people here in the forums are still talking about "facts", like "silent majorities" and "loud minorities". It's the last thing which makes me so angry, because my personal experience regarding Starbound - which takes place outside the offical forums - is so far from that. However, most of these people don't even check the forums, some of them didn't even realize that Chucklefish was moving to London or other things.

But still, if you have a look at the graphs, a collapse from 90k to approximately a few thousands players on Steam is far way from "the first view" category. I can't even speculate how much the reputation of Chucklefish may have suffered under the current circumstances.

 

There is a bottom line to every industry and business and in this one its making good games. Even ghoulish companies like EA still make buttloads of cash by making games that people want to play. On the other hand, it does not matter how friendly your team is, if you don't give results then people will be screaming for your head. People will bitch if you aren't living up to their expectations and that is to be expected, no matter how much you pad it with PR. If they manage to pull a good game out of their ass someday then all will be forgotten. Development seems slow, but who knows, some behemoth of a patch could be around the corner to make everyone forget the slow times.

 

It's sooooo rare I run into people who understand this.

 

thanks for the clear up. But this IS their first game, isn't it? And just to prevent any more misunderstandings, i'm not trying to insult them. I know many are fed up over the overwhelming amounts of posts that scream 'LEAVE CHUCKLEFISH ALONE', and i'll admit that this IS one of them. However, i felt the need to just to express my thoughts on this matter.

On another note, since Starbound SHOULD be this their first game, i meant that they were inexperienced in the form of publishing a game and providing news, not their ability to develop one as a company.

 

Oh ok right on. I've had at least one thread regarding tech balancing moved so I wasn't really sure the policy.