The best thing I think we can do here is put out an expansion that will have broad appeal across different segments of the GD audience, while also helping to attract new players.
With each expansion though, you tend to see less and less people come back. Games get old, new games come out, people get their fill.
In most other genres, people play through a game and they’re content. For some reason in ARPGs, there is a portion of players who expect the game to last forever. For some it does keep their interest for years and that’s awesome. We’ve put a lot of effort into building out side, secret, challenge and high-level content for those ultra hardcore players, way more than we did on TQ, to a degree that I’m sure is not even profitable.
Unfortunately, I don’t think it makes sense for us to go further in that direction than we already are. The portion of players who finish the game on Elite difficulty is only 8.1% and the number who defeat even one Nemesis monster on Elite or Ultimate is 5.7%.
I mean maybe we could look at unlocking difficulties for the ultra hardcore 3.2% of the audience that has played through Ultimate but it’s not like that is going to make us any money since we don’t get paid per hour of play.
The economics of GD are quite a bit different than Path of Exile. As a f2p game, those big spikes in players returning don’t really mean much in terms of profit, since a lot of those people will never pay anything or their life-time expenditure will be some low amount. The real purpose of the expansions is to keep a smaller core audience playing, much like you suggest we could do… however, how do we actually make money off people just sticking around and playing? F2p games make a huge portion of their profits off a small dedicated group of loyal players by getting them to spend huge amounts over time.
It’s funny because I think a lot of hardcore players hate f2p but it’s the game model that best supports continued investment in a game, to create content for that audience. Yet, I think if we turned to that, people would be upset. GD is also not set up for that - you need secure servers, you need your game to be always-online, and you need an in-game micro-transaction economy.
GD earns revenue completely differently. We make the vast majority of profit that we’re going to make from players the moment they purchase the game (any additional revenue coming from DLC purchases, which many people also do up front anyway). The vast majority, something like 90%+ of GD players never play through more than once. They have some fun with the game, are satisfied and move on. I don’t think there is much we can do to change that, it’s just the nature of most people. It’s the reason PoE has those dramatic ups and downs in player numbers - most people return, play through the new content once, then leave, probably without spending any money.
GD player numbers go up when we have sales and release DLC. On a day to day basis though, GD sales are higher now than they were this time last year (although once we get past the 2016 release date, that won’t be the case, given the huge spike we had at release). The average player numbers for GD have been fairly consistent and were actually higher in Feb than in the prior 8 months, so I certainly wouldn’t say they’re dropping off. Of course they’re lower than at release, when everyone showed up to play through the finished game for the first time…
So I think GD has been fairly stable and will continue to be a good source of revenue for us for at least another year or two. The expansion will certainly help with that and if it does well enough, we’ll put out additional content.
At some point, there will be a diminishing return though and the solution for that is to keep creating new games that can capture people’s interest again.