How Much Does Multiplayer Population Matter?
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- Опубликовано: 11 июн 2024
- Written, Voiced, and Edited by Lucas Raycevick
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Music List (In-Order):
Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad OST
Metal Gear 2 OST
Klaus Badelt - Nowhere to Run
Downforce - Track 01
Tiger Woods 2005 OST
Call of Duty World at War OST - On the Way
Mick Gordon - Snapmap 01
Neotokyo OST
Game/Film List:
Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad
Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45
Apex Legends
Overwatch
Rainbow Six Siege
F1 2020
Valorant
DOOM (2016)
Reflex
Halo 4
Wreckfest
Trackmania 2: Stadium
Dirty Bomb
GRIP
Quake Champions
Halo: The Master Chief Collection
Star Wars Battlefront II
Titanfall 2
Hotshot Racing
Team Fortress 2
Guild Wars 2
Lawbreakers
Battlefield V
Diabotical
Insurgency: Sandstorm
Squad
Quantum League
Halo 3
Halo Reach
Halo 2
Rocket League
Counter Strike: Global Offensive
Neotokyo
BPM: Bullets Per Minute
Battlerite
Sea of Thieves
Ironsight
Starcraft II
Payday 2
Team Fortress 2
Mount & Blade II
Assetto Corsa
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019)
Strange Brigade
Fortnite
Star Wars Squadrons
Battlefield Bad Company 2 
Игры
1:04 Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme
Delete your discord for the betterment of humanity
Two of my favorite content creators in one place. It's like a 2020 Vidcon.
@Tristan Morgan You mean CoVidcon!
I’m so sorry, everyone.
@@deadfr0g why would u say that u sick man?
Great video, however there is one big thing that you didn't mention - different regions. Low game population means that you're shit out of luck if you want to play something niche or unpopular in your region. Say 1k playerbase of titanfall might be fine if you're in NA but completely unplayable anywhere else.
Tried to play Titanfall 2 in Australia and I had queue times of 20mins+ with all modes selected. Seemed fun but I can't get into a match to learn and try.
As someone who lives in NZ, this is 100% accurate. Titanfall 2 is literally dead here(on PS4) last time I tried about a month ago, I waited for 20mins before I threw in the towel.
That's what happened with Battlefield 1 and Battlefront 2, It became so hard and weird to play in servers where i have 300 ping so i gave up
This also applies to Quake Champions as well!
343 removed my server as a default region for MCC, and now instead of playing comfortably in East/Southeast Asia/Aus servers now it's basically West/Central US or GTFO
The only games I think I've seen legitimately "die" in recent years are The Culling, The Culling 2, and Deathgarden.
And I'm not even sure The Culling 2 was ever even alive enough to die.
Lawbrakers
i will never forgive Behaviour for the death of Deathgarden
@@DrLynch2009 well yeah, but he mentioned Lawbreakers in the video.
Evolve, Evolve 2 :-(
Fractured space... Too forgotten too fast to even be mentioned as a dead game - despite being absolutely good.
Being Australian, I feel like how "dead" a game is can be a lot more important for my ability to find a lobby than you have found in your experience. When a game is carrying on with a small but functional player base in NA and EU servers, it may be false to call it "dead" on these servers but there may actually be much of the day or the entire day when I can't find a lobby with playable ping due to smaller population and geographical isolation. I just thought this would be an interesting point to consider in this discussion.
This is true for me too, as a Thai. I love me some fighting game but it is almost impossible to find a match with good connection for the less popular game. Tho, the fact that Thai barely play any fighter could also be blame for that.
@@auspiciouskaktus2692 It's mostly when older games get 'overtaken' by newer games. Like Insurgency 2014 died in OCE around when sandstorm came out, and RO2 died locally when RS2 took off. We have south east asian servers with ~100 ping for Insurgency though, and SEA servers should stay alive for RS2 even if '83 is successful. Squad also has 8 full 100player servers at night in AU, which is incredible for a niche game. Post Scriptum is dead now though except Friday/Saturdays.
Obviously to a much lesser extent, but Europe faces a similar problem. Even "new" games end up with less than 1000 players if it isn't like, call of duty
Yup, this is how it is for me too. If a game doesn't have enough players for there to be an AUS population then your forced to play at 250ms+ and it's usually impossible.
I agree. For instance with Rising Storm, if I'm lucky I might be able to get a server with some Australian's, but if that one is full I have to play in an Asian server. Same with Rainbow and other times, which does ruin the experience. Once again it depends on the time in when I play.
Living in New Zealand, I feel like it also kinda depends on where you live. When games start to slump in popularity, it can really hurt to find servers where I'm not rubberbanding all over the place, especially when it's niche games that are only really popular in places like Eastern Europe. A lot of games don't even run that well when playing on US servers, so if a game doesn't have a good Oceania playerbase then it can border on unplayable - or at the very least, unenjoyable.
NZer too, agree.
Mainstream titles have good oceania servers. But anything a few years old, or not mainstream, may just have asian servers which are higher ping and have a language barrier.
Living in a populated area allows smaller games to have a viable core fan base
Indeed. As someone living in Brazil, it's sad to see games that while still played worldwide are nothing but dead on your country, with either no players, or worse, no servers.
From NZ too. Of course the band aid fix to this is a peer-to-peer/ server system like the one Bungie has set up for Destiny, which yes, allows players from pretty much anywhere to play together, but creates its own problems with latency/ rubber banding etc. :/
Im playing halo 3 mcc on pc and even with a group we dont get australian host it always ends up in america with 200+ ping
yeah the problem is much worse when you live in Africa (South Africa in my case) where it's EU servers at 250ms or bust because only like five games have local servers. Unfortunately a game's population has a huge impact on player run servers since it determines how worth it is for those admins to keep them up... I cant cant find a Battlefield 4 Server thats playable for the life of me even though i know it still has a reasonably large player base in the US. Doesn't add much to the conversation i know but boy i just wanna bitch about it -_-
Jesus, you work fast dude
Bro you have 3 videos maybe you should work fast too
ICrowbarYourFace that was fucking nasty 🤮
TJ Levey chute
Pixel, Can't wair for new vids. We need you man. Please.
This man really out here
"Game X is dead!" = "Game X is not the flavor-of-the-month on Twitch."
@Quadsword destiny 2 is dying bro..
Destiny 2 is not dead.
most people that don't got a Grinding Fetish just gave up, is all.
they are still 100.000 strong.
This video has a critical flaw: it only applies to NA and maybe EU region. Any other time zone makes games impossible to find if it's not the latest release.
Ah now I see why most foreigns are a bunch of 16 yr old pricks online. Then again the PS4 era is just kinda weak as it is. Small playerbases in every single game you go to except games like cod, etc.
@@Slurpified funny and ass to say but everyone I know who owns a ps4/5 is a sheep who swims with the stream in every part of life. Sheeple who wanna stay hip. Most real and most old gamers have long migrated to PC. Man I rather use stadia and play with the cool people on there than playing with the swarms of toxic children and old losers who swarm the consoles nowadays. I miss the old days when it was niche
@@AbuHajarAlBugatti Haha indeed. I just miss the Xbox 360 tbh. Nothing ever topped that when it came to multiplayer online. Amazing stuff was getting pumped out left and right.. Too good..
@@Slurpified ignore the PCmasterrace weirdo, this has been a thing for longer than people realise on console, same shit happens a lot of the time on PC too. Many popular games that are PC and console die quicker on PC than other parts, mostly due to a wide variety of games to play but also the way in which friend groups work on PC compared to console.
I've been playing PC on PC for over a decade, I played consoles games before that and generally what happens is peoples friends want to play one game, so the person swaps, I remember on the original xbox playing rainbow six and the game dying so quickly due to halo 2, mostly cause halo 2 was more casual so it was easier to get friends to play, way more relaxed atmosphere, same shit happened with the 360. I had a lot of friends that went from Halo 3 to CoD 4, just due to the ability to do well in CoD being slightly easier than doing well in Halo.
It's cyclical, but you should get a PC if you really want to play a larger variety of games, the hardest part is finding new friends.
@@ProierThanYou No its more of the fact genres such as shooters have become oversaturated and mainstream.
Honestly I think “that games dead” is often just used as a way to dunk on a game the speaker doesn’t like and wants to see fail.
100%. If anything they should say “this game is dead to me”
like how people speak of destiny 2.
They keep saying it's dead while more than 60k active on weekdays in steam alone
Also these children that spend more time on twitch than in the games themselves, I saw people already trying to dunk on Fall Guys's Twitter account because Among Us became more popular as if they were taking sides lol
@@Totaraum At least then it's easy to dismiss those people when it comes to games that still has a strong player base.
@@tonypeppermint5329 yup, because then it's just a silly opinion
As someone who occasionally still plays medal of honor allied assault online you would be surprised how long a dedicated fan base can keep a game alive.
Dude, i was playing Chrome: SpecForce, 13 years after realse and found two guys fighting. Is this game dead?
I started playing Titanfall 2 3 years after the game was released and I kust became as dedicated s the rest that has been around since release or this game's support.
@@reaux1560 Titanfall 2 from what I've seen is still nowhere close to dead, I still get loads upon loads of full matches while playing it on all modes.
*day of defeat has entered the chat*
@@bigdaz8378 yea same here
"Dead Game" matters a lot when it comes to the Oceanic region, some games while still having thousands of active players are pretty much unplayable as those players are in the NA, EU or Asia. Playing games at 200+ pings or waiting 10 min to find a lobby is not a fun experience especially when I can spend that 10 min playing a different game (also take into account not everyone has a lot of time to play). I imagine its a similar issue when it comes to the African and Middle Eastern Regions. So while the term "Dead Game" seems like hyperbole to someone in NA or EU take a moment to think that a drop in player basses always hurts the other regions first and maybe the term "Dead Game" doesn't seem so ridiculous at a second glance.
I was just thinking about that as the video reached the end. Australians/New Zealand players often have connected to West Coast servers or to Singapore/Japan and they always have high ping. That would be a major pain.
Can confirm, there's a bunch of games that are rendered unplayable due to the issues associated with low population. Even some more current titles are suffering, battlefield v for instance. You can get a game of conquest or rush, maybe outposts if you are lucky. The rest is pretty much locked off.
There's a significant population decline during the week, at night. You will be lucky to find a game with reasonable population.
The really good players are known by name, and they are more than capable of shifting the balance too much and spoiling the game, to the point at which people leave when they join.
Crossout is not playable at all, you will sit in queue for 5 minutes before you get defaulted to a region overseas.
Yeah, ngl, this video was super close-minded. He’s acting like everyone has access to every server. I can confirm, RO2 is a dead game... where I live. I literally have no servers to join. Titanfall 2 was a dead game, and then was revived a tiny bit. But for a long time, I would leave my PC on for a few hours, just to see if it would even try to join a game.
Somone realises the problem im not alone.😂
Yeah I strongly agree. I live in India and most multiplayer games with the highest player count in steam but the ping is nearly impossible to get under 100ms.
Everyone: OVERWATCH IS DEAD, I'M LEAVING THIS GAME!!!
Me and 16 fellas playing Warhammer Space Marine for the last 9 years: pathetic
I mean it is dead in a spiritual sense
Me playing warhammer eternal crusade: atleast its morally alive
Yoooo I used to play 40k space marine all the time, I played a little bit recently. Maybe we played together lmao. Sadly the pvp servers don't seem to be populated at all, so I played private gsmes with some friends and we played some coop ones with randos.
Relic’s space marine needs a sequel
Man used to play space marine loads before it became arduous to find a game on the 360.
I remember playing a match where we all just ended up copying the same plasma cannon loadout and it was such a laugh.
to add to the end: "just play the multiplayer game you want to play." as long as the servers are online, since modern games seldom give Lan/server hosting support anymore :/
@@stayskeptic3923 Could that be because they want people to buy and play the new games they develop, or simply because it is too hard to implement and support LAN/server hosting? Almost every hosted server for almost every game I've played had modifications to the server settings, 1000x exp servers, new gamemodes, even new games coded from scratch using what they have available. I'm not saying that is a bad thing, but from the eyes of the developers it is something they did not intend, so they might've basically said "Sod it, you only play our matchmaking from now on."
Or it could be simply because they want people to consume their product and move on to the next in the couple of years that they make the new one.
This is why offline games are far superior.
@@utisti4976 Offline games, and dedicated server settings are better than games as a service. A veteran can make game rules they can set up.
ΛutistiЄ I also prefer single player campaigns
”dead games are unavoidable" *shows neotokyo*
ouch
too soon
Wasn't the music from neotokyo too?
@@SONNENKVLT Yep
Bruh
NeoTokyo Fridays
We still play neotokyo! Join ANP (active neotokyo players group) on steam, full servers every Friday.
I think it's important to make a note on games that have a small population of a few thousand players but still get shut down anyway because the publisher only want big money success that comes with a popular blockbuster smash hit. This was especially bad in the MMO genre in the 2000's where every publisher thought they could take a bite out of the WoW playerbase and was then shut down out of spite despite having thousands of dedicated monthly paying customers, they wanted all the money and would not accept some of it. The same happened again in the 2010's with MOBAs, some didn't even make it out of beta because player numbers were decided too low so they were shuttered before given the official release, then the same again with many BR games in the late 2010's. Almost all these games are literally impossible to play now official servers are shut down and interest in pirate hacked servers is very limited, with no fault of the fanbase, instead just a very greedy industry chasing trends for easy money.
True!
I WANNA BUY TITANFALL 2 DAMN IT STOP MAKING ME DOUBT IT
@@nunothedude get it. Our community is alive. And we fight hard.
@@Zynet_Eseled just bougth it 2 weeks ago and fell in love too bad people lied to me i can find games in less than 20 secs
@@nunothedude it takes me about a minute
I think what contributes to people declaring a game dead is seeing their friends who used to play the game not playing anymore, and them not getting enjoyment from the game anymore. Also, while I agree with you on most points, I think your experience with "dead" games vary significantly to others because you're in the US. If a game has 5000 active players and most of them are in the US then your experience remains the same, but for someone like me outside the US, that game is very much dead. I'm a dirty bomb player and, I'll be lucky if I get a server where my ping is under 170ms when I try to play the game now.
Your definition of a low population of an old game is different to mine. I'm sure it's actually proportional in North America with the much larger population, but playing multiplayer on older games on Australian servers can often be literally impossible. As must as I love living here, the low population makes niche hobbies sooooo difficult sometimes.
on the contrary i get matched with tons of aussies when playing low player count games in my local asian hemisphere. the upside down land server ping can be terrible at times but at least theres someone there.
Time to reach the emus how to play
@@kael070 Emu war 2: Call of duty edition
Imagine emus in CoD post-game lobby game-chat
I got into Doom 2016's multiplayer a while back and there was actually something fun about seeing the same guys over and over. Killing someone and then realizing it was that guy who destroyed you a couple matches ago felt great.
That's the deal in most pre-2012 arena shooters. You see the same people over and over, even across games sometimes.
Once played some Unreal Tournament 2004 FFA for an hour or so, switched to Quake Live, duelled a guy I just saw in the previous game.
Ya I’m still sad it not longer support via eternal
sad ID did not make a sequel to 2016's multiplayer
@@iwiffitthitotonacc4673 Playing on community servers with and against the same guys every night was always a great experience in the 90's and 2000's server browser hosted games.
It infuriates me how "modern" multiplayer games are implemented, namely the piece of shit "always online" approach. I remember a time when player hosted servers were a thing, when playing on LAN is a thing. There are few things more stupid than setting up a custom lobby with someone sitting at another computer in the same room as you and having lag because you're playing on remote servers.
Nowadays games come with a built in killswitch, they have an expiration date. They're only functional for as long as the publisher run dedicated servers are up. Once it doesn't make sense financially to keep the servers up the game is shut down making it forever unplayable. This shit should be illegal if you ask me.
I can still play the Unreal Tournament 2004 with a friend on LAN but Lawbreakers was completely killed off remotely. I can play Quake 3 Arena but I fear that I won't be able to play Quake Champions in 5 years from now even if I wanted to. This is not normal, "always online, games-as-a-service" are a disease.
Games shouldn't have a publisher enforced expiration date, losing the ability to host servers is the biggest hit the gaming community has suffered.
I agree this should be illegal. They fucking took those games from us just as much as if they would have walked into our homes and smashed the discs with a hammer.
100% agree.
@@todesziege Why would it be illegal? You don't own the game, not even if you buy it physical. Just like you don't own a movie just because you buy a blu-ray.
i mean.. even back then a lot of games used a masterservers to actualy allow you to connect to a player hosted server(not lan mind you) thats why a lot of games shtu down a few years ago, Gamespy shut down, as gamespy WAS hosting the masterservers for these titles. aka the server that the player conects to for the server list as well as other infos necessery.
also. no it shoudl not be illegal, you own a Time limited License of playing the game, its in the the ToS etc, you just dont fucking read them
What about games such as DOTA 2, CS:GO and TF2? They still have custom servers and you can host a server freely. Like I participated in these custom servers and I didn't have a bad experience especially in TF2.
"How Much Does Multiplayer Population Matter?"
As a dude who played Warcraft 3 all the way till Reforged came out... not much at all. What matters is a loyal population.
As an arena shooter fan, I feel a deep connection to RTS and fighting game fans. We have the same struggles and eerily similar experiences.
I disagree.
Game got barely playable past 2014, as server population got too low to actually support diverse game modes. Host botting contributed, as there is no way to filter away empty servers.
I don't even know what Reforged did to server population, but it really annoyed me that nobody would host interesting experimental games. So going from playing a diverse random map portofolio to playing Element TD, Island Defense and some water down version of Maul because it wasn't possible to get full teams anymore.
Of course having a dedicated population is more important, but unless you have a high population of players you’ll never be able to play half of the modes in the game. Take titanfall 2 for example, that game is fantastic and has a very dedicated and loyal population, but you can’t ever find a game that isn’t attrition because the game has so few players
*Online population drops a single percentile*
Media: IS [THE GAME]'S CAREER OVER?
Oh duude an F1 meme yeeeah!
Tribes: Ascend has the skill problem - the only remaining players are so good, and the skill floor for Tribes is so high, and the ceiling astronomically high. I remember having so much fun back in the day but if I try playing these days I'm lucky to be alive for longer than a few seconds and even luckier to get a kill.
Quake arena also
Was wishing this game be mentioned. Literally only one server is played and they recently deleted Oceana servers (Aussie), meaning the one imperative thing u need to actually play this game, Ping, is lost.
Quake, Classic CS, and Tripwire games all seem to have a community that is largely skilled and can pose a challenge to newbies. Being an RS2 veteran, it’s sad seeing new guys get frustrated and quit before they even reach level 30. Anytime I see that I killed a level 0-10 I make sure to welcome them to the community and hopefully show that it isn’t a hostile community. (Generally speaking)
same thing with titanfall 2
@@olixo9852 [VGTA] [VGY]
Design challenges about team games:
- Can't easily implement bots for some games
- Need communication system like voice chat to play effectively: some people soloQ with varying success
- Need complex mathematical models to measure a player's MMR
- Can be killed by a decrease in player population, as this video mentions
I think that deva should definitely implement bots so that players can enjoy the game years or even decades after the game has died
"if the player count is low because people can't find others of their skill they will leave because they can't find others of their skill"
That's what kicked me out of quake champions. I played it when it was free and absolutely loved it. Was kicking ass and doing awesome consistently. Idk what exactly happened but I hit a point where I was queuing against people with astronomically more skill and experience then me and I hit a brick wall where I could barely get a kill. Eventually I just decided it wasn't for me :/
Yeah, exactly the same here with Quake Champions, played the beta for a bit, did fine, eventually ended up on multiple servers where there was a player who just won the match alone. One guy went 54-5 in a 3v4 match, single handedly winning the game for the side with 3 players. I was on his team and we were just spectators at that point.
Same thing when I played Titanfall 2, I was having a lot of fun and played it all the time, but everyone was better than me and I keep getting killed, and now i don't feel like playing it sometimes.
You completely forgot about server locations, in Oceania/Australia servers, amount of players is extremely important,
seen games with 10,000 players have only 3 local servers.
This is very much true unfortunately.
This is very true, I recently bought Squad and play in OCE, despite having ~12,000 players, the OCE region will only have 2 or 3 servers populated at anyone time which translates to only about 200 people.
Most annoying trends of sayings are "this game is dead" and "imagine playing this game in 2020". Let people enjoy themselves, jeesh.
TF2 has been dying ever since it was released in 2007. If I was to die, I'd rather die like TF2.
Rising Storm 2: Vietnam is gonna be available for free on the Epic Games store starting on the 8th of October. I highly encourage any FPS fans to try it out.
No thanks, I'm not getting Epic Spyware Store, I want to keep my PC clean of filth.
@@Andri474 Oki then you can buy it on g2a for 3.65€.
@@Andri474 But you have Google Chrome, and you're using Windows which are as much a spyware as the Epic Store.
the FGC probably has the most to talk about "Dead Games" out of any audience.
Specially the skill problem. In Australia we have a rea problem where games are rapidly only populated by a tiny super elite hardcore and it’s just impossible for anyone new to really break into.
Who really wants to spend hundreds of hours to just be able to complete at a game with like 50 players
They actively kill their games tho. They "support" it for like a week, play the abysmal ranked mode and get burned out. They don't try to have fun with them they focus too much on being pro which kills their drive when it seems like they're not as good as they think they are in SF5 or Tekken. I remember when Tekken was dead because players kept saying it's the hardest game to learn when that's a whole lie.
Most people tend to give up. So it seems like every time a new game comes out it becomes the most popular for about 2 weeks and then about 80% of players quit. That 20% will probably stay for the rest of the games life. The truth is that since FGs are 1v1 affairs, they can survive on way lower populations than other genres.
@@Deadagent Which is true, you only need like 4 people and big time FG OG's play so many games well they can honestly paragon multiple games. It's why when we see Japanese Evo you got killers in so many games or you watch some SNK content and you see legit gods out of Latin America.
Yet it is truly sad most people really only ride the hype and move on. Where whomever is left is "the scene"
Holy shit a youtuber talking about this old gem, had countless hours of fun with friends getting our heads blownup by tank shells
OH NOOOOOO!!! Most people agree that my vids are the worst on RUclips. I agree to disagree. Please agree to disagree with the haters, dear tac
@@AxxLAfriku wut
Darkest hour: europe 1944. Only one or two servers full every friday and saturday. Not bad for a 2003 game. I love it
Great game that
its a good game but the lack of communication and coordination from your buddies is really annoying
@@ninjafighterblue9413 yup. you are right
I was waiting to see the Darkest Hour Comment
@@Gepedrglass we are men of culture
Using the Neotokyo soundtrack was lowkey brilliant. That community has been thriving off of 50 - 100 active players or so for the past 5 years.
I'm still sad neotokyo never made it to the heights that CS did, it's such and wonderful and unique game. Really breaks my heart.
@@LynnVal I started playing it regularly in the past weeks and it's truly a wonderful game.
2 years ago, I decided to boot up the 2012 sleeper-hit Chivalry: Medieval Warfare - a 1st-person/3rd person melee game where you weird swords, shields, maces, crossbows, catapults, and the like.
It's a very "niche" game with just the right amount of jank that can be used for legitimately clever gameplay.
Despite there only being about 10 populated servers at a time (and only about 3 or 4 of them located in USA, with the rest in South America, Europe, and Australia), I still have a blast playing the game. The same regular players join practically every night to relish in highly-addictive melee combat and hilarious Monty Python-style banter (the voice acting is absolutely amusing).
I'm so tired of so many people calling games dead when they have never actually experienced a real dead game. People really like to whine when a game is not mainstream anymore or when it has like 2 or 3 years...
"CSGO" "Heroes and Generals" and any battlefield game. These are one of the most common called "dead games". Especially csgo, when it is compared to like overwatch or something, and that "valorant will kill. It"
A real dead game you say?
Battleborn.
It was dead on arrival because Gearbox couldn't FUCKING FIX IT.
Framerates being so up the ass you could feel it, matchmaking so fucked you'd end up with the top 100's players in a row for hours, business decisions so bad that they KILLED THE GAME.
Thanks Randy Bobandy Pitchford the Third, you greasy fuckwit.
Don't forget about people calling a game dead when it stops being patched weekly or when DLC is no longer released. And I'm talking about singleplayer games like Assassin's Creed
Now that I think of it, I kinda miss Warside.
yeah, remember ricochet?
a game is truly dead when nobody complains about it anymore
- swimstrim
So fortnite isn’t dead
H0lm3s Destiny 2 is the most active game ever!
"Go play the Multiplayer that you want to play"
-Looks over at my copy of Resident Evil Outbreak and cries-
Fans have managed to reopen the servers on PC. Now with a totally legitimate PS2 and a totally legit copy of Outbreak, you too, can play with your friends. I've seen it done before. As for how well playing with randoms is, not too sure on that front. From what I've seen, it's gonna be unlikely to play with a bunch of randoms. But hey, you can still pull your friends into Outbreak, and watch them struggle to get through the RE experience while you sit there (or not) and watch, so there still fun to be had.
@@daddysempaichan Yeah my friend keeps a close eye on it, things are a lot easier to get going than back in the day that's for sure~
People often cry "Dead Game" way too quickly.
However as someone in Aus/Ocenaic region low player populations are felt a lot more here.
Something people often forget to think about when discussing player counts is taking into accouunt all regions. Which is also made harder when you are not told how high your playercounts are.
This. As a Brazilian player I can also attest to this. Not to mention the high latency in those cases.
@@En7my Me too lol, i can barely find a Brazilian server match in BF1 nowadays and playing with 300 pong isn't fun at all but hey i still find them at least in weekends.
A game dies when its impossible to play ie shut downs or you being the only player online
A game dies when a small contingent of losers think they can keep it alive and then make an argument that the game isn't dead. 1k players across 4 regions, 3 of which are in different time zones : DEAD. GAME...you're spending upwards of 10 minutes waiting for a room, or not even trying.
Sandstorm during the week, basically.
@@DxBlack
yes but, you forget that most of these "dead" games have User-Maintained Servers.
they will only die if Playercount hits 0, and that ain't happening no matter how niche the game is.
Unless the devs had dedicated servers support or at least bots for training. Heck Battlefield 2 is still being played to this day
@@DxBlack if you can still play a match with another human being it isnt dead a dead game is a game that cant be played
@@DxBlack Mate when the fuck do you have to wait 10 minutes for a Sandstorm game. Unless you mean the dead ranked mode
Tf2 literally had a new all time high a couple of days ago.
Sadly that new peak is also because of bot accounts spammed into the game.
@@spamhands6993 tf2 got its first big update in years, theres no way the vast majority of accounts aren't real people. Yes bots are a still a big problem but I think that scream fortress genuinely increased the player count by a lot
Dead game
@@doommaker4000 you make me sick
dead game
"kotaku per hour" is my new favorite unit of the year... GG
I remember the days when the servers for multiplayer on Fall of Cybertron on PS3. Great multiplayer, but there was always maybe 200 of us who would log in with any kind frequency. Eventually we all started recognizing each other and matches were always a toss up. Great times and definitely why I think a large player base isn’t always needed to have a great time
RO2 nerd here part of the group of guys that hosts one of the servers keeping the game alive. Thanks for giving our beloved game some attention :)
I may not have traveled the lands of WW2...But as a goddamn g.i, I'm glad we're gonna get much more attention. I need mote rooks to shoot with my M14!
This video got me to DL it last night. Had never heard of it before. Joined the Divided EU server, and had the most fun I've had in a multiplayer game for ages. I got absolutely merked all the time, but never has getting just one kill felt so satisfying!
@@LokkesBoerlin Welcome to RO2! Im happy you like it. The more people playing it the better. You will get the hang of it im sure. See you on the front :)
As someone from Southeast Asia I wish this would also apply to us :(
When playing niche multiplayer games we either get high ping or long waiting times for matchmaking
200ms ping gang
The horror of playing Dirty Bomb with 200 ping when I wander to the ranked playlist. Like Jesus Christ.
The server also has familiar faces after familiar faces which didn't help but still....
Thanks to this I've gotten used to playing with over 200ms
It's absolutely hellish and annoying at first but atleast it's passable now
@@malif1279 same tbh
although sometimes it's kinda bullshit when you already went into cover & still get killed because the enemy somehow see you haven't gone into a cover
An aspect to this that I feel is very important but often overlooked is community. How popular your game is has impacts on more than just the experience of playing it. And as many of us in any number of communities can speak to, the value a game provides can often be divided evenly between what you get from playing it and what you get from people who play it.
The popularity of your game can easily represent the activeness of it's community. Having a very active playerbase very frequently also means you have an active community. Which means you get more discussion, content, memes, jokes, references, and are more likely to hear communication from devs on future content/updates.
I've had more than a few experiences of being away for a few years from a multiplayer game I love and then returning to it's subreddit only to see posts aren't spaced by minutes, but days. To see that it's main discord's last comment was a week ago. To see discussions be "extensive" if they barely reach more than 10 replies before everyone abandons it. To see that nobody has posted fan art in months. To see the majority of posts are from prospective players/members asking if the game/community is dead, and the only replies being "yes". These examples are on the extreme end, but they do happen, and they are only more severe examples of what happens when a playerbase massively drops off.
When you have less players it means that you have less content creators in the playerbase and the content creators who have stuck around have less drive. You don't have any (or at best might have a singular person or two who are the last stragglers) of the big heavily edited high quality posts. Meme makers are less driven cause they know the same work is at best only going to get a quarter of the response it used to get. Discussions don't end up being these huge forums of ideas spanning hundreds of replies, so the exchange of ideas dies down. These are very real consequences to the falling of player counts.
I think it's just important to consider the ramifications of lower playercount that exists outside of simply the game itself. Especially for those of us who are actively involved with the communities of games we play. Of course you'll have games that have a low playercount but an active community, like Titanfall 2 and Team Fortress 2. And of course you'll have games that have a high playercount but a community that is much less active than what you'd expect from a game with that many players, like PUBG or ARK. But for most games you can expect a reflection in some degree between the activness of the playerbase and the activness of it's community. I can find a game easily in Killer Instinct, but going into it's subreddit you're lucky to see more than 2 posts a day and posts are popular if they get more than 25 upvotes.
lol, lvl 50 in titanfall is literally 1% of the level cap due to the 100 prestieges
level 5049 is the level cap
If people can see the SteamChart, super important. Because the moment someone sees a game is "dead" on steamcharts, it starts to die faster and faster and faster until only the last diehards are left, and they all feel like they're playing a dead game, and new players refuse to come to the game because game is dead.
See Quake Champions as a great example of this death spiral.
This is very true, I’ve found it hard to get my friends into games like HL2DM.
I do feel like there's some truth to this, but ultimately at least half of people parroting "ded gaem" probably never played those games in the first place.
Also, QC has a miriad of other problems. I keep revisiting it once in a couple years only to find out bugs from years ago still aren't fixed or new ones are added in. Every patch is 1 step forward, 2 steps back. But the devs sure do care to make it monetizable instead of playable.
You can still find games easier on Quake Champions than any other arena shooter, it's certainly not dead. Plus milsim/tac shooter fans really don't care about player count unless it's below the amount that can fill a few servers. Even a game like Holdfast with napoleonic Era warfare can get by with a few hundred players memeing together on a good day and having an absolute ball.
Yeah.
@@petrutorlac7840 tf2 is far from dead it even got an update.
As somebody who still plays Day of Defeat: Source daily. Thank you for this.
What's funny is that most of the people saying that a game's dead, aren't playing the game.
Chess is thousands of years old yet the game has had a big resurgence recently from streamers getting young people into playing it online. I'm sure people have been saying Chess is dead every time something faster or fresher comes out, but it still remains strong, a good game stands on it's own merits and as long as it has fans and a few players it will never die.
I don't think the player count of chess is even comparable to dead games. Chess has had regular tournaments all over the world for hundreds of years. Meanwhile some games you have to go on IRC and have to ask people to play with you order to get a match going. Even before the most recent uptick for cheese I have never had an issue finding opponents in online chess.
Table top games seemingly never die, you can even find people who still regularly play Risk, the game that all strategy games are derived from, similar to how DnD is what all RPGs are derived from and will also likely never die.
This notification popping up in my feed was the best thing to happen to me today. Still trying to work out whether that's a good or bad thing.
Probably bad, but it's appreciated regardless :)
The only games that I consider truly dead are games like Chromehounds, where the multiplayer servers were shut down so nobody can play it any more.
Holy crap someone else who played that game. I wish they would remake it.
I payed full price for Brink
@@df71091 So did I back when it came out. The commercial for that game was great
@@SmashingSnow i also pre ordered Evolve 😅
@@df71091 I didn't
So cool to hear you give a little shoutout to Mount and Blade in this video. Throughout I was thinking about my recent experiences playing in the Napoleonic Wars Bot Survival Servers. A friend of mine has been playing in this server for years and got me to join up with him starting in March. It regularly only has around 40 people playing on it a night, but because of the way the server/mods pick how many bots to kill, it is always a fun fight. Last week we hopped on and there were 90 people in, and it was one of my favorite gaming moments ever. I had never seen more then 50 people tops in the server, and getting to do a huge battle with that many people was an absolute joy. Bad news is, it made the server crash for more then half the players lol.
Just listening to your voice alone makes me wanna rewatch your Metro Series a 3rd time.
Great job man, thanks.
It really has always struck me as odd when someone says Overwatch is dead.
I still play the game 4 years later and I still see new names and faces every time I play on even the most niche of modes.
Hell, people were saying the game was "dead" within the first year. I think it's really only a term used by people that simply want to see a game die rather than something used for games that are actually dead.
What people really mean is “I don’t play this game anymore so nobody does”
@@Lunarous1993 Also "they are nerfing/buffing a character I hate".
i think people say that "x game is dead" because they dont enjoy it anymore
I find this with TF2 as well, although 2 of the modes are practically never played and so you run into the same people pretty often.
SpartanS 117C if tf2 can die over 10 times in its 13 year lifespan and then somehow still be considered alive, then any game with a sizable playerbase and a dedicated community won’t just die because of poor developer decisions and shit like that
There is a limit to how small a playerbase can get, especially in a game without a server browser.
Titanfall 2 is a prime example, even with every game mode selected, you can go minutes without finding a game. Its Steam release bumped the numbers up for a while but it's player count has already plummeted again.
1,234 players at the moment, not origin included. It's not good but it's not super bad
I remember when battleborn was dying and it would take lateral hours to find a match. I would have it open on one monitor searching for a game and playing another game on my main monitor.
Though it also depends on region. Picking a server in São Paulo makes it almost impossible to find a match within an acceptable amount of time, but hopping in New York or London can change that pretty nicely.
Been playing tf2 4 days straight, looked at the steam chatts and was surprised how quickly the playercount dropped. Cant put my finger on why tho. Maybe the amount of maps and etc.?
@@crystalcastleyoshi the old players obliterate the noobs mercilessly. The game requires people time to adjust to its pace and movement style
im one of the 5 people who still play TRIBES ASCEND and my ping is always 300
Tribes ascend still has players?!
I redownloaded it just this spring to check whats up with it, and there wasnt a single lobby.
I help run a custom modded multiplayer Terraria server with various minigames and such, similar to the big Minecraft minigame servers like Hypixel. Difference is that Terraria's multiplayer community is incredibly niche. Our all time concurrent player peak was somewhere around 250, on weekends it's less than 150, and during the slowest hours it can get as low as sub-50. The idea that a 1,000 concurrent player game is "dead" sound crazy to me because I'd love to get numbers even half as high as that. Even then, finding lobbies is totally doable, especially for more popular gamemodes. That being said, from a game design perspective, there are lots of tradeoffs and restrictions you have when your numbers are that low that more popular games don't have. For instance, skill-based matchmaking is completely out of the question for us to implement, and we're forced to feature a random subset of our gamemodes each day to try and corral players together to keep enough lobbies full. Most minigames on the server need to be designed around catering to all skill levels as well as allowing players to join mid-match to minimize queue times.
It's not as easy, and it's a little bit less convenient for players in a lot of aspects, but with a little bit of creativity from developers, they can make workarounds around the problems that small playerbases cause.
A way that they could limit and reduce how quickly a game goes ‘dead’ could be to implement a decent AI system with NPC players. Sort of how Battlefront or Clone Wars video games worked. Not many games have that anymore, would help much more with enhancing the feel of ‘big’ battle games on large or even medium sized maps.
Just don't do it the fake way like nintendo did on mobile, where it filled with AI pretending to be other humans
@@RNCHFND exactly go the titanfall route were they are labeled as bots
no thanks from me. im not going to play a multiplayer game so that i can verse bots. i would rather have double queue times to verse real players than play against a lobby of ai
elihu landy it could just be a supplement, not necessarily the entire enemy team. Look at the games I referred to.
@@Spacemarine658 In Titanfall I never kill bots, I always ignore them and I`m looking for other pilots since it`s more rewarding to kill other players than bots.
Im glad you covered Red Orchestra 2, Rising Storm 2 has been dealing with similar stuff for a while now. The game has a stagnant yet consistent playerbase of about 1500ish people many of whom you’ll come to recognize if you end up as one of those 1500ish people.
It’s insane that big online games get called dead long before they hit that 1500 (or less) number but a niche game like RS2 or RO2 can support a relatively thriving community despite issues like bugs that will never be fixed or a map creator which has been broken or a permanent drought of new content.
And I 100% agree with your point that games that rely more on individual skill die in a much worse fashion. In a game like Rising Storm 2 as long as you have a good commander or squad lead you’ll be able to learn and grow because there is leadership to help and guide you. Even if you don’t get a dozen+ kills like all the high level players in your squad or team you’ll still be able to take something away from every match.
Rising Storm 2's gameplay loop is so chaotic and fun there's no other game that you can move to after playing it that'd be an improvement imo, so the players that get hooked are stuck with it (like me lol). Hopefully there are a decent amount of fresh faces when it goes free on EGS for a bit, but the player base of RS2 is really healthy regardless
Robert M There’s been tons of new faces since the Steam sale, for better or for worse. I definitely do get a lot of joy out of seeing how these new players react to the game though, it kind of feels like I’m a father taking his child to school for the first time, I feel a lot of joy when these new players get excitement I no longer get when dropping into the battlefield on Hueys or when they get all giddy when nape gets dropped on a cap.
Granted this joy fades when I get shot in the back of the head by a new player because they couldn’t see my little blue marker or when a new player decides today is the day he wants to try being a Cobra pilot with absolutely no experience.
@@BobsRevenge Couldn't agree more
I wonder what are economics of that kind of game, since it was healthy constant playerbase, how much to keep servers etc running? Big companies always argue it costs too much, but I havent seen any estimates; to compare for small studios, if they have interest to build small scale player base (no AAA level studio, marketing etc costs and ambitions), how viable it is. Today it could be possible, as platforms are so robust and good.
RS2 Deds Troll Factory gang
Geographical location also matters. I agree titanfall 2,rising storm vietnam, insurgency sandstorm etc. are far from being a dead game. But since the majority of the population are from NA and/or EU and me living in Asia,i always find it hard to find a lobby with playable ping even during peak hours. I thought this could be an interesting point in the discussion
Fantastic commentary. I've thought the same thing for years. I'm glad someone in the community/industry finally talked on this.
There is a game called "JoJo's bizzare adventure: eyes of heaven"
It's a 2v2 action arena fighting game,
It's absolutely dead, about 3 to 5 people on at any given time, but I've been playing online for about two years, and I always manage to find people who play this game as much as me, becase it really is a fun game, it has flaws, but you don't play a JoJo game to play fairly, you play to have fun, and with friends, it's honestly a really fun experience.
A game could be dead, but there's always someone out there, looking for someone to play with!
Thats interesting, playing with same people do you get to know their playstyle and can you predict what they will do?
@@arsenkurmangali2997 usually I can recognize people on a regular basis, I know who to avoid, recognize those with good internet connections, and fun people to play against, there are new people that come in now and again, but it's hard for them to grow, because people who took the time to learn the nuances absolutely dominate, and people usually give up and stop playing
Heyyy... a few of my friends play Eyes of Heaven sometimes with randoms. It's a fun game. I wonder if you've ever seen a Jaredzep online...
this was the last place I was expecting a jojo reference.
5 words:
Fightcade, Heritage for the Future.
A game is only dead when theirs only like, 100 people and it's hard to find a lobby. If you can easily find a lobby, it's not dead.
bruh, the amount of tards on YT who say battlefield 4 is "dead", despite having thousands of concurrent players really annoys me.
@@zolikat4458 Yea its retarded. And even if it is dead by definition, so what? I can still easily find a nearly full lobby with the server browser on console, so who cares.
Gears of War is a AAA franchise that usually has a few thousand to a few hundred players online at any given time (at least gears 3 and gears 4, not sure about gears 5). I play those on PC now but it's cross play.
Edit: I also play older titles like Battlefield 4 (released 2013) on Xbox One and Battlefield Bad Company 1 and 2 (released 2008 and 2010 respectively) on the Xbox 360. The player count is in the dozens, in fact, it's so low that I regularly run into the same gamertags and I can even know the playstyles and strengths and weaknesses of my team and the enemy team just based on their players (certain players play certain classes/weapons, etc).
You seem to get the diehard fans of a game left being in it, so they are usually pretty damn good and know all the tricks to the game.
I remember being able to fill a server on instagib venice in sauerbraten. It was wonderful chaos.
Having bots in games is essential to providing a multiplayer experience even when player count is high. Devs need to spend more time making smart bots rather than bots that are harder by cheating. Bots help because people can still play a dead multiplayer game. Good smart bots can be more enjoyable than humans players who ironically might be more predictable. Many human only multiplayer matches can be extremely boring because everyone does exactly the samething every time.
I occasionally jump onto a game called Double Action: Boogaloo which uses bots to fill empty servers which always makes it fun to kill time in, despite extremely low player counts
I like how everyone calls TF2 dead but after scream fortress it literally got more players than ever before
More players than Destiny 2.
While it has twice the concurrent numbers it used to have, the tf2 I know and love is dead and no-one is making a golden-age balance mod for some reason.
bots, hackers, terrible balance updates, no real meaningful updates in three years, terrible optimization issues...
@@bigblue344 Optimization aside (never heard anyone complain about that) i agree.
Big Blue - And despite all this, the game is still good. As such, people still play.
Idiot gamers: "Overwatch is dead"
Me: *Laughs in OpenSpades*
Was great to see a couple clips from GRIP in there. Love that game, and wish more people knew about it. Great video!
all i can say is when cs:go was at around 60k players it was loads of fun, most matches we're great and the community, while sometimes toxic, was still decent, but as more and more players flooded in, so did the cancer, the cheating, the abuse, and the fun kind of died. Nowadays it's a miracle when you have a game where both no one is cheating and no one is hurling abuses at someone else, to the point where i don't even know why i still play since every single time i do it's a terrible experience that ends in frustration.
Back then i'd stop playing the game at 6am because my eyes we're closing by themselves and i just couldn't keep going, now i play one game and at the end i'm like "f this game i'm doing something else".
So yeah, more players doesn't equal more fun. Not at all.
Hate to sound like a massive hipster here but I started playing DayZ before it blew up and it resulted in some of the best online experiences I've had in a game. The community was nuts and enjoyed a level of roleplay. When the playerbase shot up it turned into the shoot-on-sight dull nightmare it became later and for me it just ruined it. I wasn't playing it for a Battlefield game with added zombies, I was playing it for the adventure.
There’s a reason the original Ghost Recon multiplayer is still alive today even no longer supported by Ubisoft, and the last entry in the series was dead on arrival.
True
Disagree, Breakpoint is a nice game I loved (I'm a single player guy so the multiplayer status doesn't really affect me)
SprkSmR so you do realise the entire premise of the video is about multiplayer. 🧐
When you said the last game was DoA that's including the whole game regardless of the topic of the video being about MP. Ubisoft has revitalized the game with multiple substantial updates since its horrible launch. Also GR mp has been trash for years imho, so why bother playing it or even bringing it up.
Valravn's Shadow 😂😂😂 because that’s the only game which multiplayer I bothered to play.
"one of the reasons ro2 is able to operate with a lower player count is that an individual doesn't have as much of an influence as in other games"
*the commander, the tank commander and squad leader 1 look around nervously*
So glad to see a video about red orchestra and rising storm 1 & 2. That was my life and blood for high school and a few years of college. Still get on every now and then and there is no game with quite the spark to it. Thank you Rayevick
I used to listen to the neotokyo ost in high school to study, and hearing one of those songs in the wild is always fucking amazing.
Ed Harrison made an extremely memorable soundtrack. I have no idea how he came up with so many good tracks, but I've been listening to them for almost 4 years.
"Dead" is hyperbolic. Don't be hyperbolic, bois. Engage that hyper gamer brain.
thanks for eloquently putting what I've been thinking for years :)
This was a great presentation and rising storm was a great example for your points. This helped me view multiplayer games a little differently now.
10:25 Showing Neotokyo as a "dead game" - true but it hurts so much.
Neotokyo may be painfully dead, but its OST still lives on in my library.
that feeling when youre OCE so none of this even applies because you cant even find 1 server to play with those 2 people
Great message. I sometimes find myself getting wrapped in the social media drama surrounding a games player count. But you are right, even if a games player count is halved over night, more than likely your experience will not be affected.
Recently got back into QuakeWorld (yeah, Quake 1 MP) and the community and population here has a few solutions to the issue of getting people together.
First, the community has discord servers that host events during the week, duel, 2v2, 4v4 and FFA on specific servers community leaders host in multiple places in the world.
Second, there is an IRC hook that has ability to broadcast messages to every server in the QuakeWorld master lists, so if someone wants to group for a 4v4 or just do duels they can broadcast to whatever server might have someone in it and people can respond.
A third solution with regards to new players is they have rookie channels and people willing to help new people learn the basics and nitty gritty of Quake. Its a bit undercooked but people have been generally helpful with getting people up to speed for the events and tournaments that happen regularly.
There's another sense this is used in: live service games where the low population means that there's no income stream for the developers, so they stop creating content for the game. Sure, you can play a "dead" live service game and have fun, but those 2000 active players mean that there won't be new content. I'm not sure how I feel about live services in general, but I feel "dead" is being used in this way in some cases.
Sadly, I've seen the service mode of thinking being carried over to other games, such as offline single player games. In those cases, if nothing's broken there's no need to release a patch -- it doesn't mean it was "abandoned" or is "dead" -- the game is just done.
As a player of the BF2 mod Project Reality I can safely say that even 15 year old mods with a peak of 200 concurrent people per day can be enjoyable with friends. If you like a game, just keep playing, find like minded people. A while ago I dipped into Giants Citizen Kabuto and that game's population is down to a single discord server that organizes play sessions weekly.
Another banger Raycevick!
MAG on PS3 was the case-in-point of some of these issues in action. By having 256 player gamemodes, the matchmaker time already took awhile. As population began to dwindle, matches would just not populate. DLC gamemodes for MAG (and in more mainstream shooters like BF4) were some of the first to have empty lobbies, meaning trophies or weapon unlocks tied to those modes could eventually become almost impossible to get. When the appeal of your game is large scale warfare, you do need a healthy pop. Or, like Verdun, you need a lot of bots.
new raycevick video i cannot feel my legs
I can relate 😔 I lost my pants today 💃💃💃
Everyone talks about population
I just want more bots :[
5persondude well whenever you’re playing that’s already one bot online
TJ Levey F
Yeah dude! Bots are the reason me and my brother still love the og starwars battlefront 2. Its like a 1v1 but with a whole bunch of extra trash that keeps every single moment fun and exciting.
Same. Offline bots are awesome.
TF2 players have to disagree
A game being "dead" is definitely a much bigger deal when it comes to fighting games despite being genre where you only need a single other person since most fighting games have shit netcode, you need to play people who live relatively close to you to have a match that's even playable
awesome vid as per usual!
Funny you showed Footage of Payday 2, especially with how much the "dead game" shtick has become a meme among the community that the devs wore shirts with the phrase plastered in bold white on them one stream.
having previously only spent roughly 30 hours in Payday:The Heist i was able to bring my hours up to 170 total this year with a playerbase of 60. Most of them were probably playing with friends since every time i hopped on there would be 2-3 lobbies. not a lot of options admittedly but that's more than enough to hop onto a game. Out of all the people i've ran into i only added one of them but i still recognized a large portion of the players i ran into. Made the game feel like a "community" a lot more than a game where i'm unlikely to run into the same player again or even remember them if i do.
I play a game called Foxhole, Is a small community. But is a open map so 300-400 players feels like a lot, but once you fight for days you get to know most players. Its beautiful. The smallest communities are the best. You get to know people, the game, and everything is more fun
@Mansoor Haque I live in the western part of the USA so i do have a regional advantage, though half the people i ran into were from eastern continents. The one guy i added was from Hungary. English wasn't the native language of a lot of them. unless all of Europe and Russia is still considered "In my location" that's a pretty broad term.
Man, I miss Ghost In The Shell: Standalone Complex First Assault. Still sad they full-on shut it down.
yeah that was actually pretty fun when it was around. sad that its gone :/
shame it was region locked for me and never could play it
There's a fan project ongoing to bring it back, but progress is at a snails pace right now.
Forward Tsender What's the fan project called?
Dang me too. It had some really cool ideas and I was looking forward to them ironing out some of the stiff combat and mechanics. But they closed shop before they could finish. Dirty Bomb is pretty close in a way if you want a similar experience.
A video analyzing the positives and negatives of server browsers and matchmaking would be a cool follow-up. 100% agree on the server browser. As someone who spent a lot of their childhood playing online f2p FPS namely Combat Arms, the fact it had a server browser was probably something that kept it alive for a lot longer than a matchmaker would. Not only could you easily browse through the available choices, but it also sparked mini-communities either by playing with certain rules (not enforced by the game) or simply dependant on the host, as they gathered recognition in the player base. With matchmaking, I find it rare to remember someone after a game.
When I was playing the game of Squadrons that showed up at 12:49 (I'm EsteeBestee), I didn't think that was actually THE Raycevick in my game. That's awesome that I got to play with you, ha.
Haha, I remember my friend saying "You think they'll see the video?" "We'll find out if they post."
I played blacklight retribution till the server closed, and for a full year, there was only 1-2 servers full with 16 players. thats it, yet finding that server when queued didnt take long at all. as long as I played in a full server, the game was still alive to me.
If you have a ps4 the servers there are Peer to Peer and i was able to quickly find matches when i played back in January. Since it's free on the PSN store you also don't need their "gold" subscription to play online. Runs at a solid 60 and got used to playing it with a controller surprisingly quickly. Just dont expect to find any matches outside of TDM or Free For All.
@@missingaforest3639 it's a shadow of its former self though, imo. I wish there was a pre-parity Blacklight build from like 2013 that was still playable
@@RatsFunHouse101 I liked parity, idk why somehow people frown on it, but it made the stale HAR meta go away so that all guns and parts were balanced, had alot of fun just beefing up to 250hp with an lmg, roleplaying as a heavy class character.
wasn't optimal, but babies still managed to cry about how unfair needing 2 extra bullets to kill me was. ahaha
Blacklight was great. I remember back in 2012 having an epic +7% damage node and a limited edition crowbar and I thought I was the coolest guy ever.
Still think that the level of true weapon/character customization hasn't been matched since. I remember people already thought the game was done for back when Hardsuit labs took over. Give your HRV a tap for me, boys
10:37 I see Battlerite there, and now I'm crying.
I honestly love when games have a small community. You end up running into the same players a lot and you can make friends easier. The player base is usually a lot more dedicated too. I never use voice comms, but i ended up making a friend through metal gear online simply because a team mate complimented my gameplay and he reached out to me. We ended up playing and talking a ton after that. That kind of stuff only happens with smaller multiplayer communitys for me.
Good video! u made some great points
The most "dead" game that I regularly play is Tribes: Ascend. I have the Steam API for its player count bookmarked so I can click to see if it's worth logging in to day - as of typing, there are seven players. Seven players is more than enough for a fun, full match. If every person that I saw saying "I miss Tribes: Ascend" actually went to play Tribes: Ascend you'd be able to find open games 24 hours a day instead of twelve. Server browsers are what separate the living games from the dead games, as long as you can choose who you want to play with and when there is almost no player count so low that it isn't worth still having fun with. Seeing people complain about games with even hundreds of active players being "dead" is hilarious in light of how regularly I'm joining Tribes servers with two other people.
But how many of the people who miss it would be able to put more than 5 minutes into those servers before being bored of getting continually fragged by the 10 players who never stopped playing, leaving the game demoralized as they feel it's not enjoyable anymore? That's the problem
@@shardperson3777 All of them, if they all actually came back. I get the sentiment, though.
In fighting games we tend to say that "as long as you have a friend to play, the game isn't dead".
I play a niche fighting game (224 people playing worldwide as of me writing this), and honestly as long as I find a single person to fight I'm happy. I play so often against the same people in my region that we pretty much know everyone that's a regular. I can't help but lol when I see people calling games with less than 10k people dead, I dream for the day that my main game gets even 1k concurrent players.
I do feel that there are many issues but you touched on the main one ( 8:09 ), I 100% agree with you on this, only the most dedicated players remain right now, and any beginner that shows up will be met with such a ridiculously steep learning curve that I wouldn't blame them for quitting. It is why many of us try our best to take all newbies and host beginner tournaments, beginner lobbies, help them out when they need help etc.
You kinda touched this point in the end too but I do believe that dedicated servers should be standard in games again. I do believe that many team games that are ACTUALLY dead could get revitalized by letting people create their own matches with their own rules.
I loved the video, it touched close to home as someone that doesn't really play very popular online games:)
What other genre has parking and toilet tournaments ?
@@TheKazuma410P exactly
This is so very true. My friends are always surprised when i dip myself in the nostalgia and play 5-10 y/o games and tell them that 200 playerbase is perfectly playable (even thou it may take some effort to hunt it down), and 500 makes me perfectly happy. Co-op games with server browsers ftw.
On the other hand i have a couple of games that have 0 players worldwide and sometimes 10 on weekends. Space Beast Terror Fright needs more publicity damit!
This video really just made me feel so much better
I just started to play some old cod titles again a month ago
Ghosts has an average of 150 players online
But it is still fun
And thanks to your video i can feel good about playing it :)