Also the truth is that PoE is not solely so much more successful than GD based on MP. There is a wide variety of stuff going into that:
It is free to play
It is the most complex ARPG on the market and every PoE fan I know loves it for exactly that, to the point where some of them look down to all other ARPGs as casual. But hands down PoE has by a magnitude more possible combinations, skills and items - and yes I have looked that up once beeing in this discussion before. PoE really got huge and the people I know who play it love it for that. The amount of combinations of skills, items and the passive skilltree is extreme. To the point where I personally dislike it because it has become difficult to navigate through that. There is so much important stuff in PoE which you easily “learn” (e.g. vendor recipes, I am sure all dedicated PoE players know them by heart) but which I do not want to learn as a simple UI window would have done that.
It has some sort of competiveness (with it’s races and events). It is not the MP and trading alone in PoE which people I know who love it, it is the whole stuff around that.
GG works extremly tight together with their community. I only always hear “and then they listened to us when we asked them for this and we asked them for that and now it is …”. It looks like PoE players feel “heard” (is this a phrase in english as well?).
Let’s face it. GD has and I repeat: has multiplayer. The only difference between a closed MP and the current form would be the illusion of legitness. And now I will tell you something as I am very interested in the technical stuff behind this illusion: No ARPG out there with “closed” MP was hackfree. And as soon as hacks exists this wall of legitness becomes a crumbled wall of illusion. And when this happens, it does not really matter anymore if the MP was closed or not. D3 has bots (and the quality of those is fucking amazing. I adore those who wrote them for their skill, but I dislike their elite-attitude they show on their forums). D2 has bots - to the point the D2 battle.net became laggy because of all the game creation spam until a recent banwave this year (or was it 2015? time flies). PoE has bots and “other” tools (my favorite signature: “if there were any anti-cheat in PoE then we’d all be banned.”). Torchlight 1&2? Can’t remember.
If Blizzard with all their resources is unable to keep a “closed” mp “closed” I don’t see the point why a small developer should take the risk and investment to fail with that. Do not misunderstand me: Of course there is a lot of stuff you can do to make hacking, botting, cheating, etc. difficult and every invested effort reduces the amount of such things and increases the level of “legitness” such a closed MP offers.
Instead of a closed MP I would wish for some other MP improvements. There are still bugs (desync lifebars, getting stuck in a loading screen) and we also experienced crashes. Then there also are some faction/quest related bugs, etc. The steam quickjoin never worked for us so far, at least the server browser does. I would much more prefer some more improvements and quality of life changes for the MP as is instead of offering some new “closed MP”. Let’s face it. The GD online MP is almost dead. GD itself is not that huge in the first place (~3.000 simultanous players on steam, maybe up to 10x as many with the GoG version but this is just a wild guess). Refreshing the server browser usually shows me like 5-6 games and those are split among several mods and vanilla and THOSE are again split among different versions of the same mod. I just can’t see why a “closed MP” would change anything of that in the orders of magnitude it likely requires to pay for that developement.
I hope for their next ARPG if they make one they don’t just implement the bare minimum for MP as it looks now. If the game offers mods it should be more easy to filter by compatible games with the same mods etc. Make it easy for people to play together is much more important than making it “closed”.
Had I time to spare, I might. If PoE had offline play, you’d probably never see me here ever again. As it stands…
The fact is that diablo 3, that is a shitty ARPG has more player than grim dawn! why? because its ONLINE!
Or because it has ‘Diablo’ in its name.
i bet that may be more than 50% of people playing grim dawn dont bought the game
…so…then GD has a lot more players playing it than PoE does, if this is true, as playercount statistics are pulled from the Steam API which doesn’t track piracy (or GoG, for that matter).
No… i am not wrong, because if they play it piracy company dont earn money so… dont matter. is a money that company is losing because its not online http://steamcharts.com/search/?q=path+of+exile http://steamcharts.com/search/?q=grim+dawn
and no… u can make Grim dawn player *2 and cant arrive to PoE players that the truth of single player focused game and PoE dont has diablo in his name
Nonsense. There will always be a market for single player games. There are markets for both types of games, it’s just that you seem to think that if a game isn’t online then it’s failing somehow. That’s not the case.
PoE has been on the market for 3 years so any comparison of like for like is a bit off. Yes GD was available as an alpha, but the full game was only released early this year and the GOG version even more recently.
D3 is popular because it’s D3. Do you think that if it had been launched with a completely different name from a small company as GD has been that it would be as popular? Given the bad things I’ve read about it I seriously doubt it. It’s mostly successful because players hoped for a new Diablo experience, having enjoyed the previous two. Unfortunately they didn’t get what they paid for. And you should ask yourself, and others who own the game, how many of them actually still play it. Again, from what I’ve read, many played for a bit and then dropped it like a hot potato.
Yeah, I would fully expect to be bollocked by POE players if I started a thread on their forum saying it would be SO much better if it was single player only.
Each game has their fans and yes of course we’re here on the forum because we like it and want to show our support to the devs. People on the PoE forum are doing the same. What’s wrong with that?
How many of those players paid even once to ever buy anything is what you should be looking at.
Countless times i have seen posts (by freeloaders) in forum complaining about 10 dollar prices. I guess it has gotten better now that they expanded to other regions as well.
Crate doesnt/shouldnt care about how many players play the game but how much money can they make from it.
Diablo 3 sold so many copies because of great marketing (diablo name and blizzard fanboys), nostalgia, hype and because D2 was a great game (which d3 turned out not to be).
I played D3 with two friends max and PoE mostly solo so i couldnt care less.
Most PoE players do not play the game over steam. I quote from 2014 and 2015
, ~154,300 users playing Path of Exile simultaneously is the record from 2014.
…
[From October 2015]
3.6m people actually played Path of Exile on Steam after downloading it (over 2m downloaded it and never played it)
Just on steam alone the record only had been 37K according to steam spy.
Again, from what I’ve read, many played for a bit and then dropped it like a hot potato.
Might be true but it does not matter for any ARPG. What really matters it the player retention rate. How many player come back after each update (and more important: how many pay for additional content like expansions/dlcs/cosmetics/whatever!). In Diablo 3 you can just wildly guess as blizzard does not give any insight. Compare to the fact that D3 is one of the most selling computer games of all times I feel like the rate is ridicusly low from the amount of open games I do see on the EU client - but then this misses everyone who plays the game solo (and of course all console players and D3 was a real hit there. Some of the people I know who disliked the PC version really like the console version!) and I assume very many people do just as in GD and PoE. For me it just feels like: If D3 is still so active, than the amount of public open games should be higher than it currently is, even if about the same rate of players is hidden for me behind closed games. In absolute numbers D3 very likely still has the most players. Compared to their sales it does not look that good. On the other hand: Compared to the number of people who downloaded PoE and never played it their number also does not look good. For GD I have no insights how good/bad it performs but it feels like it completly underperforms for it’s quality and is horribly marketed. I have seen one test in my usual online gaming e-zine and a follow up video later. That was it in the whole lifetime of the game.
As long as enough people buy the new content a game is successfull in my eyes. It might be that the content is completed to quickly. For D3 it usually took me a few days to get fully geared (single character) in the end. In the beginning it was not interestingly to compare how fast you are geared as others simply could invest money in the RMAH and have a complete set as soon as they dropped enough money into it. That completly breaks any competition when all you need is gear.
that the truth of single player focused game and PoE dont has diablo in his name