RolStoppable said:
Yes, we have enough numbers to come to that conclusion. Rocket League was free on PS+ in July 2015. Approximately 5m free downloads. At the time of the below announcement, Rocket League still had one week of being free left, but said 5m figure also includes purchases of the game on Steam and the PS4. Sony didn't provide regular updates for the number of PS+ subscribers in the early years of the PS4, but making an estimate for the number of subscribers in July 2015 isn't too hard. Definitely above 10m subscribers. Rocket League gained immense traction, but more than half of all subscribers who could have gotten it for free still didn't bother to download it. Hardly surprising when online multiplayer is the main and commonly sole reason for people to subscribe to PS+. PS+ is a service that launched in 2010, but had only 1m subscribers by the time the PS4 launched. It was only when online multiplayer was put behind the paywall that the service gained traction. Now you could speculate that less popular games than Rocket League achieve the same or better download rates, but that's neither reasonable nor realistic. The selection of free PS+ titles hasn't been exactly stellar in the last few years either. |
Enough numbers for all your assumptions above? One tweet about the 5 million downloads for one game?
If that's not just anecdotal then I don't know what is.
How do you know that only 5 million PS+ subscribers downloaded Rocket League? That was just an intermediate status after 3 weeks. We don't know how many PS+ subscribers downloaded it in the following week (or activated it in the PS+ month and downloaded it later).
How do you know that Rocket League was the best case scenario and that it has gone downhill after that? Rocket League was still a hidden gem in its month of release, the huge popularity came later (and for a big part due to the word of mouth of the PS+ subscribers). Of course there were more niche games on PS+ with less downloads, but there were also much more prominent games on PS+. To generalize that download rates for other PS+ games can be expected to be (well) below 10% of active subscribers during any given month is just stupid.
Pigeonhole thinking at its best.
