Ubisoft: Tencent, Guillemot Family Weighing Buyout

[Chazore]

Ryuu96 said:

It has annoyed me recently, Steam CCU used to be a little fun, like a "oh look at how much CCU it hit, that's awesome, okay moving on" but now it's being weaponised a lot, I see "Oh Palworld is dead because it decreased by --%" and likewise for Helldivers 2...Because of course the games are not going to maintain a near 1m CCU FFS. The % drop will be huge if they hit a massive height, Lol.

Developers would kill for the numbers that Palworld and Helldivers 2 are still getting, and this is just Steam CCU, it doesn't take into account Xbox/PlayStation player-bases either, I mean, sometimes you can use Steam CCU to make a fair assessment that a game is dead, like with Concord, but also some games do better on PC than Console and some games do better on Console than PC.

And yup it's even more dumb to use Steam CCU for SP titles and use it as an judgement as to whether a game is a failure or not. As for Frostpunk 2, I doubt it will be that high but it's also on PC Game Pass. God help the industry if these investors start obsessing over Steam CCU FFS. Reminds me of the stupid days of giving bonuses for hitting a certain Meta score, instead of the actual overall performance of the videogame, Lol.

Just became a weaponised thing lately, too many low-evidence claims made because of it and too much gloating.

It's been like that even in the Steam Palworld forums. People bringing up it's CCU count, even from people who don't even own the damn game. It seems to get worse with time, because now if a dev isn't posting a blog about an upcoming update within a given week/2 weeks, people assume a game is dead.

I feel like there's been a weird shift in some people's mentality regarding games being finished up, and games that take time to develop, but I also feel like it's part to blame with the era we've had of live service games (where people expect constant updates, constant feedback to the customer on a weekly/monthly basis), that it's caused people to assume the worst if the CCU is low, or there has been no given update within a few weeks. 

As for myself, I've owned Project Zomboid since it's early access release way back in 2013, and that game is still in dev, and I've been fine with the studio taking their time to improve the game, but I'll by no means mark it down as a dead game given it's time cycle, or CCU count fluctuating. As Gabe once said, "these things, they take time".

Frostpunk 2 has sold well for what it is. it's a hardcore survival city sim. At this moment in time, the game is kinda taxing on the CPU and even GPU side (I've been watching Piratesoftware streaming it on Twitch the past few days and even he notes it's performance tax, and the same goes for ACG's review). I feel like that game has it's own niche to fill, but it's hw demands can be a bit of a roadblock for some (I know I won't be able to cut it on my current rig).

Something you said did remind me of something similar though, in that we see gamers and investors paying attention to game CCU's on Steam, but at the same time we end up seeing publishers paying attention to Steam's overall CCU for logins (the higher the number, the harder is can be to ignore, like Ubisoft coming back to Steam after their stint of leaving it on and off since 2019).

It's weird how the CCU has become the central focus, because the more important aspect should have always been the sales in general, as well as the overall user review scores (mostly to overwhelmingly positive makes for a glowing score to the general public than a CCU count will). 

Last edited by Chazore - on 27 September 2024