Ohhhh. That’s my one of the biggest dreams… to get seasons or ladders in Grim Dawn 
Hopefully, will be in GD2 if ofc it ever comes out haha 
I played the hell out of PoE up until 4 years ago, but I lost all patience with the buggy play, for example being killed immediately on entering a map, several times in a row. It was with that Syndicate or whatever it was called, didn’t want to even bother with that overly convoluted mess.
Bought and tried GD, no bugs, no need to constantly check an encyclopedia to figure out things. I can tolerate bugs to a point , but when developers don’t seem to care, that’s enough. GD is a far more polished game, lots of helpful people on the forums, devs listen.to their audience.The pace is far more to my liking, not “twitchy” at all, no zoom-zoom.
I am still waiting and praying for an official Grim Dawn TCG, or roguelike deckbuilder, set in the world of Grim Dawn! Yes I am still designing my own tabletop card game set in the Grim Dawn lore, but an official release of a title in this genre from Crate would be so awesome! Fingers crossed one day it happens.
Closest you’ll get to that is the community run leagues. Last one was from December to February. They’ll probably do another one, but when …
I wouldn’t say the difference is that huge. POE community is actually pretty small - but constantly galvanized by its life service nature, and boosted by the fact that it’s F2P. It’s not the biggest community, just the noisiest.
And Diablo is Diablo. It’s popular by the virtue of the name alone. And Diablo 3 actually was a good game. I leveled 2 characters and had a lot of fun in it, and only got bored in the endgame. Which isn’t something a regular casual player will care about.
For a paid indie game that doesn’t demand you logging in every season, and leaves you to play at your own leisure? GD is doing fucking fantastic. And it holds a very strong niche for itself - moddable offline ARPG. No seasonal cancer, no buggy servers, no “meta reshuffles”. It literally has no competitors in that aspect.
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the absolute necessity for a game to be popular is player interaction. it all comes down to this. you need cooperation or competition, preferably both. this is why streamers are important and why ladders are important (but ladders need servers and servers need maintenance). no one knew about poe until it implemented those. also direct competition matters. d2 had perfect pvp. grim dawn has good pvp, i mean no one can expect another d2 because that game had insane luck that even the bugs just added to the pvp perfection (wsg, strbug, etc), but its still very nice. poe has hands down the worst pvp ive ever seen. the damn thing is less balanced than donald trump and less coherent than joe biden. however poe implemented competition on the pvm level and so did d3. also a random suggestion but if someone can make a pvp server and mod that teleporting rune to have a really short cooldown, that would be like when they added enigma to d2 
anyways. lemme tell you the real reason behind poes player numbers, since i do have a lot of personal experience after all. you see, theres a number of psychological tricks games today use to keep players, tricks that grim dawn doesnt use. well poe uses all of them. heres how it works, its kinda tldr but oh well:
ggg (company that made poe) pays some streamers to play it for a while. now i know they claim this is a conspiracy theory, but i claim they are full of shit 
anyways, the streamer plays the game and gets a bunch of good drops so he (and his audience) gets a dopamine hit. this happens due to streamers having different drop rates compared to the average pleb. this is called “streamer rng” and again, ggg says its just an illusion, but i actually did the math on it and i trust them as much as i trust a cardboard chair under jim sterlings ass ehm anyways, the viewer is like “oooh, this is a free to play game, imma play it!”, so he joins and is immediately greeted by unavoidable chat messages to buy stash tabs to improve the playing and trading experience. soon he will realize that without those tabs, he wouldnt have any playing nor trading experience at all, as his stash would be filled faster than an inmate’s wife during a conjugal visit. free to play my ass. aaanyway, he is invested now and its time for, you guessed it, battle pass, which is designed to make him pay more if he plays, and play more if he pays. and since the game requires you to have a fucking phd to be any good at it, he starts to visit forums and watch youtube podcasts, where he meets chris wilson, the resident psychopath and poe’s main developer. “such a nice human”, he thinks, “now i feel much better that i paid and supported this indie company owned by tencent”. so thanks to sunken cost fallacy, he is all in. he starts to orbit the forums and give insane amounts of money, and if anyone says anything remotely hostile, will defend ggg’s actions to the death. he will get burned out but still come back every league, because if he misses even a single content update of that thing, he is back to square one along with the subhuman trash that just downloaded the game 
so yeah. i may sound salty, which is because i am. but this isnt what happened to me. i am literally immune to this type of propaganda, not just because im autistic af, but mostly because i live in serbia and im not gonna waste my monthly paycheck on two premium stash tabs. but it does bother me when shit people do this well in life. the only good thing is that poe is content bloated so hard right now, that it is literally impossible for new players. also people are finally seeing through the PR which makes me happy. so that is basically why poe is so popular. the most perfect PR and psychology teams humanity has ever seen
edit: no idea about d3, never played it
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Agreed with Zantai. Grim Dawn is, by far, the best single player ARPG ever made.
But most players are not looking for good games, and they are not looking for single player games. They are looking for lootbox-filled always-online experiences where they can show off to their friends how cool they are because they used mommy’s credit card to buy the latest $25 skin.
The fact that GD characters are always-offline has a big part in this, I think. If you can GDstash the $25 skin, then the skin isn’t cool to kids. Just how it is, consumerist propaganda on overdrive.
Unless GD2 is released, I could be playing GD in 10 years, or 20. An always-online game is something I don’t bother investing in, personally.
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i never invest in always online games either because i avoid investing in stuff i dont physically own. for example i lost years old poe acc because i got a tainted ip address by a dynamic ip provider. no dmg taken cause i didnt invest a single dime, but imagine if that happened to an average poe player who probably has 300$+ invested
and speaking of gd skins, i cant express enough how much i love the illusionist feature that makes it possible to customize looks 
its very old school, you need to actually find the item and not to pay irl cash for it
thanks, but no thanks. i really hate seasons. don’t see the point in starting from scratch every time. In GD i got just one char, since early access, and i’ve played something like 230 hours or so… in HC.
seasons are for games with little depth and/or cash-crabs.
Yeah, online stuff beyond basic co-op would kill a lot of the appeal. There’s plenty of online ARPGs out there for people that want that, let people have their single player focused ARPGs too.
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I do wanna end this by saying, despite my polemic about Offline being amazing. I do sometimes with GD had a closed, online server option. It would still be fun to play with friends, and to keep out cheaters.
It just needs a way to convert online → offline characters at any time via an offline game client. So I’m hoping in GD2 (whenever that may be) will implement such a system.
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Freedom comes with a price, I am afraid.
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It’s personal preferences. I took a little time off Grim Dawn. Not only grim in most newer games to play some psp etc. I may start again but I am really busy with work :s but guess that’s life.
I only think it needs more high quality exposure.
More players should create videos on youtube where anyone familiar with the genre can watch clearly the experience of GD.
Most videos i see on youtube are 90% explain build 10% gameplay (with the camera so far out I can’t see anything, and the lowest graphics)
We should create a good experience for any viewer who is looking for more GD online.
I WANT TO WATCH CONTENT FOR GRIM DAWN WITH THE SAME APPROACH AS MATHILIFICATION VIDEOS FOR PATH OF EXILE
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noticed recently, there are players on the steam forum that will praise Grim Dawn to the stars, some even with lots of play hours; but they didn’t leave a “thumbs up”/positive review - left no review at all 
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Yeah, I wonder who those can be… Go, gt them!
I wasn’t aware of this game up until recently. I must say, though, it truly is a hidden gem. The graphics cater to the game perfectly, it has a beautiful day and night cycle, and I love all of the reflective lightning from the particle effects. Gameplay is really solid as well, I love how responsive and fluid the character movement is, the combat is really satisfying as well.
The only thing it seems to be missing is a few small quality of life improvements. I can see they’re working on adding some of those for the next batch (confirmed loot beams), so yeah, a real nice touch.
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It’s an indie game, but I don’t think it really qualifies as a hidden gem; it has over 70,000 reviews on Steam.
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I wouldnt rly say its a hidden gem…i dont think i have ever seen a top 10 arpg list with grim dawn not being in it,granted the genre is TINY compared to other game genres,but…as i see it,GD simply is to far in the middle to atract huge numbers,it doesnt have the complexity of POE,and it doesnt have the easy quick acces and casual apeal of d3
the engine is also dated,a lot of people will be put off by that instantly,diablo 4 may be complete dogshit but it looks amazing and plays smooth,also people have a major boner for games as a live service
even titan quest,a game i feel has more name recognition than GD still has lower numbers on steam atleast
ofc always take these numbers with a grain of salt as steam isnt the only platform these games are on
people are divided on live service games these days.
on the one hand, we had gamers who prefer single player games with optional coop who demand games which were mostly bug free and deliver its promised content on launch day. they dislike live service games because they don’t want to be spammed with mtx offering when they play, and they hate unrestricted mtx stuff that heavily intrudes on gameplay balance. they also were sick of being used as unpaid beta testers for live service games that were very buggy and lacking many promised content on launch day (many AAA studios had already normalized this trend for years).
on another hand, we got gamers who love live service games because it means the games will be frequently updated with new contents and events, and it will attract many players that will live up the competitive environment of these games. they were indifferent with mtx stuff intruding upon gameplay balance because their mind were already normalized with it
grim dawn caters toward the first group of players above, reinforced with crate’s firm stance on making gd as an old school single player focused rpg. this means gd is not as popular for arpg players who loved competitive live service games like PoE.