Basing this genuine question from A. Steam chart, B. Twitch views.
I just don’t understand this. Whenever you look for top x best ARPGs in 2023/2/1/0 all the way down to GD release- GD is almost always 2nd, 3rd or atleast 4th in the genre.
Now, I can understand why PoE is more popular, and I guess I know why D3 is more popula (only because its Blizzard, hate that game’s gameplay).
BUT- why is the difference so huge? For the 3rd top game in the genre I would guess it will have atleast 20-30% of the genre’s playerbase. But when you look at twitch view count, steam charts- it seems like PoE and D3 got 95% of the playerbase. What happened? Why?
The 3rd best shooter doesn’t have 77 views on twitch while the 2nd place get 15k (those are real numbers from GD vs D3 views yesterday).
Ofcourse, it doesn’t affect my love for the game and appreciation for the devs one bit.
I’m just curious why did the genre situation became as it is today.
Probably because the game doesn’t have enough exposure from large arpg content creators like Rhykker. And the game falls into a nice point of balance for the arpg genre. It is too complicated for the casual D3 crowd and not fast enough for PoE players.
One other thing is the fact that the game had major content updates and quality of life changes across the years, but the main window of exposure is during the release period. People are probably unaware of the improvements the game received. The game didn’t resonate too well with me when I played it for the first time because of all the “stop to pick up components” and the fact that components came in pieces and required merging to achieve full potential. The game was slower and grindier. After the option to pick up stuff automatically was added and components were changed to spawn in a complete form, I finally started enjoying it more.
Ultimately, I think it comes down to Grim Dawn being a different niche. We set out to make a singleplayer-first experience.
There are no seasons or dramatic meta shifts to keep content creators sated. People are not competing online to see who gets the fastest clear every 3 months. That’s the kind of stuff that motivates livestreams to keep playing.
Despite Grim Dawn being able to entertain people for thousands of hours, it is effectively finite. D3 and PoE were created to keep people grinding forever. PoE especially with the dramatic seasonal mechanics. But that is their business model. The game is F2P, so the revenue stream has to come from players coming back again and again, buying stash tabs, cosmetics, etc. We got your money at the door and said, have at it!
And then you deviously kept improving it and expanding it and patching it even though you already got our money. I’m onto you, you rascals, you won’t get away with pro-consumer attitudes like that I tell you!
I really appreciate you coming to reply to our simple question, Zantai
Regarding to your reply, look at Dark Souls. I’m a fan of the souls series, and they are almost mainly single player games. Needless to mention, Elden Ring- which had tremendous succes for a single player mostly game.
But even From Software started with Demon’s Souls (in the Action RPG genre) before coming up with the much more successful Dark Souls.
What I’m saying is- with Crate’s dedication to their game (soon- games) and to their playerbase- my guess is if you guys could pull Grim Dawn Too™ off, after the success of the first game- you guys are sure to become as successful as From Software or close to it. I’m rooting for you guys! Grim Dawn STILL has huge potentital to become much bigger success than it is today.
I mean…what about it? Elden Ring has a fraction of the viewers compared to the likes of PoE and other online games on Twitch. And that’s a huge AAA title that exploded onto the scene last year.
Grim Dawn has done, and continues to do, very well, but it’s simply a different scale of things. We were mostly unknown, working on a relatively tiny budget. We had virtually no PR outside of some ads. Our initial scope for the game was a fraction of what we shipped with, but early access allowed us to grow the game dramatically.
Obviously. Grim Dawn is a huge achievement in the video game industry.
What I meant to say is that single player games might be finite and thus less popular- but even they can land 20 million downloads (Elden Ring) and I love the idea of Grim Dawn’s universe being expanded and attracting a much larger playerbase.
Don’t know if that’s realistic, but I just hope the devs would get the widespread recognition they deserve.
From what I know of the studio, it seems they don’t care about ‘fame and recognition’ as much as other people. They seem relatively content to work on the games they created and let their work speak for itself.
Which is all and well, fame and recognition might not be the driving force by itself, which I actually really love.
But what it does give- resources. Resources for a game in a bigger scale, better production, and having the capabilities to bring any crazy big idea into fruition.
The other thing to consider is quality. Crate have been working on GD since 2012, some of them for even longer than that and were on Titan Quest before then. They’d like a break from the ARPG genre for a while and also want to expand their IP portfolio so they’re not just relying on GD to bring in the cash.
I don’t play PoE, but from comments I’ve read each new league is worse than the last which is sorta what you get when you have to keep churning out new content on a regular basis/tight schedule.
And don’t forget Crate is still a small company of 15 people. Grinding Gear Games has 115 employees. Crate is totally independent of any publisher, Grinding Gear Games is 93.3% owned by Tencent. That’s a big difference.
popular doesn’t always mean its better. its just much more accessible to average players of the genre. but gd + its mods would always be among the top looter grinder arpg imo, with focus on sandboxy single player experience like torchlight 2, titan quest & sacred 2. yes the content will be finite compared to those big multiplayer meta racers like diablo, poe, wolcen etc, but the single-player sandboxy feeling (with occasional coop multi) + the mods and no pressure to keep up with meta or ranking or whatever competitive stuff is what attracted many players to the niche like grim dawn in the first place.
The only reason I can see is GD not really being a huge ONLINE success…as it was kind of developed with single player in mind and multiplayer was still implemented for groups of peeps that love the game. PoE is a huge ONLINE type of game and same with Diablo series…with that being said I think GD is by far the BEST Arpg I’ve ever played and I always come back to it and have a blast with the huge amount of diverse builds you can pull off.
The only sad thing to me really was SONY not helping CRATE to deliver this gem to the consoles…where me and my bro could have enjoyed the hell out of it.
D3 is not really an ARPG any more anyway, it’s an arcade mulitplayer brawler. Do runs → collect rewards → do runs again. I’m amazed it still has people play it, the same thing with minor tweaks to the slot machine chances or some numbers here and there every few months.
I don’t think I’d want Crate designing Grim Dawn around that model. At all.
PoE is interesting in that people continue to log on every three months and play for a week or two (look at how much steam charts spike and then completely die with the patches). That tells me again their model is like adding new activities to the carnival that hits town every few months and people turn up to see if they’re fun and then don’t come back. The features PoE is adding don’t seem to create any real long term interest, because the player numbers continually drop down to <5k after a couple of weeks of season, there’s no permanent growth. I think they’re making a mistake by not making PoE 2 separate to PoE 1, but that’s just me. The game is bloated, unnecessarily complex, relies on the 3rd party market and is not new player friendly.
Again, I would not want Crate to focus development on these ideas.
So I like Grim Dawn because it’s a game all to itself, which can be extended with mods as we please. The content can be explored in many ways and characters can be ‘done,’ time to start anew. It’s a different audience to the online-focused ARPG’s (which ironically seem to be mostly played solo anyway…), and I’m glad for it. And thankfully, it’s popular enough
Grim Dawn isn’t far behind in popularity, it’s ‘popular’ enough. I think we need to stop using ‘popularity’ as a metric, it’s not a measure of quality, unless we think Tabloid media is the epitome of journalism…
A good comparison would be Wolcen, or maybe even Last Epoch (despite being in early access maybe) - where despite Wolcen blowing up on release, manages to have basically no one playing it since
or you do a similar comparison on other games like Fortnite/CSGO/COD vs other smaller studio fps releases, guarantee that you will find similar trends across other games/genres
i think a decent way to see that Grim Dawn isn’t really “behind” in popularity is the constant trickle of influx in new players, and the rather steady avg player count maintained over years. If it wasn’t “popular” the number should drop off, but it doesn’t so far
New update came a few weeks ago, the game was on a tremendous sale (some people got it for like 5$ iirc) and a big streamer switched from POE to Wolcen for a short time, not sure how long that lasted. Lots of factors to reel in a few new players - assuming they didn’t run into any game breaking bugs like most of us who got burned on release, they might stick around for a bit.
