I may have gotten things mixed up but I does steam db only keep count of players on steam?. Taking in account their concurrents and the fact that they capped the servers to 450k wouldn’t that mean the majority of players are on pc?. Or do they have a seperate server cap for PlayStation users?. Either way the Pc release concurrent release is what pushed this game to be bigger than what they expected..
Everything’s a fanboy war to you guys. You cannot stop caressing your plastic boxes and corporations. I have the game I won’t be buying it again so there is no reason for me to port beg. Fuck the other day I said I would welcome PlayStation players to gears of war if Microsoft released it. I really only care about good games and the health of them. Works wonders when you aren’t a shill. Should try it.
Edit. Meant to clarify they capped it a few days ago.
Yes, SteamDB only tracks Steam usage. Recently the server caps raised to 800K, so a little over half the players are on PC. I'd say it's probably ~ between 55% Steam/45% PS5 to 53% Steam/47% PS5.
As to the rest of that comment...surely you aren't saying I'm shilling or fanboying for Sony/PlayStation, right? Just because I'm trying to see the bigger picture with the game's popularity across PC & console, and know that if it were in fact leaning heavily on PC (Steam) carrying the game, there are many disingenuous people who'd be using it to push flimsy narratives and agendas? Which has already been happening.
My issue is people are using Helldivers 2 performance on Steam to draw conclusions that Sony should do certain other drastic things for PC going forward, when the correlations they're trying to make to reach that conclusion are extremely weak. I'd be doing the same if it were Xbox, but there's no point because Microsoft have already gone full-in with simultaneous console/PC Day 1 push (which I stand by saying, at some significant detriment to the appeal of their console to a lot of would-be customers).
Of course ultimately the game being successful is what should matter, but I don't think we have to dive into questionable, flawed takes like "No more exclusives!" "Exclusives are anti-consumer!!", "This is why Sony should go all-in Day 1 PC for all their games!" and other similar hogwash. Because unfortunately for the few that may just be saying that stuff with ulterior motives, that type of talk IMO has been poisoned by influencers, media and diehard fans of a very specific platform holder because that type of push just happens to conveniently fit the market strategy of said platform holder. And when even the CEO of the division of that platform is saying and signaling the same crap, then we get these narratives spun up with very convenient timing.
That is in some form, some type of (in this case nefarious) agenda to sway public opinion, and it's not nearly as "pro-consumer" as it lets on. It all "conveniently" works out best for that specific platform holder's financials and getting more control of the market. So it's actually purely capitalist desires hiding behind "pro-consumer" sentiment.
I don't like that.
Regardless of title, I think we can all agree that Tassi sucks.
BIG facts.
I would had guessed the PC crowd is way more than 50/50 or even 60/40.
When Arrowhead stated their servers were capped at 450k, at the very moment Steam checks showed the count was around 380,000. So that means 70k PS5.
Wasn't that correlated with the infographic Mat Piscatella put up on Twitter? The one he then redacted because it wasn't representative of actual player counts across the console?
Because people were using that infographic (and point-in-time metrics like the one you're using here) to insinuate the overall player count on PS5 is very low for the game relative Steam. Yet that also matched with times the game was #1 on the platform for Most Played, even ahead of games like Fortnite and GTA5.
The infographic was for US-only but it still was a questionable graphic because I find it very hard to believe the biggest F2P games in the US had CCUs lower than 70K on PS5, except at the very lowest of load sessions. Regardless any takeaway that the Steam player-base for game is some > 6x larger than on PS5 based on a snapshot of CCUs at a very specific point in time, or a very limited infographic for only one region in the world, is foolish.
For example it could also be that in the US specifically most of the game's traffic is on Steam but in other parts of the world it's PS5. Yet since those parts of the world probably have peak game times outside of the peak hours the US has time zone-wise, if those other parts of the world are mainly accessing it on PS5s then during the US peaks PS5 usage would be low, freeing capacity on servers for Steam players.
That's how you might get things like the infographic Mat posted on Twitter a few days ago.
He did and helldivers prooved there is much growth to be had in gaas and mp, which Im all for it, even though I dont care about this games, a lot of gamers do... but saying this strategy also includes their Single Player games from big studios ... well thats reaching and hopium for now.
Sony cant be oblivious of how this day 1 strategy devaluated xbox hardware and how the opposite strategy works just fine for nintendo, they have to cut costs, trimmer down development costs, better invest their money and improve game output looking for a little smaller and less costive games.
Trying to just reach the PC audience while taking value off their consoles is suicidal, this myth that consoles users wont jump ship for a now more powerfull, customizable and with all the games in the market avaible in just one box is ludicrous... just ask xbox.
It's mystifying how so many refuse to see what's so obvious. There's an idea I had for Sony in terms of reigning in development costs though, although it might be somewhat contentious.
In the Insomniac hack we saw that their plan for Spiderman 3 is to split it up or "compartmentalize" it into hefty smaller chunks, with the single-player and then multi-player, and then some other thing. Maybe, in addition to the obvious measures for reducing costs (cutting some project redundancies with too much overlap of demo/genre, less licenses in some areas, more AA games etc.), Sony should consider making their AAA single-player epics "episodic".
I know some people hate the phrase "episodic" but I did always kind of think this would be a potential solution. In fact, with Game Pass I thought Microsoft would do this with a lot of their own games, but it's dawned on me they have very few games that actually lend themselves well to an episodic format. Whereas with Sony, they have tons of cinematic story-driven games, which go perfectly well with an episodic or semi-episodic approach.
So maybe for example, instead of one massive traditional release for say TLOU Part 3, they split it up into three parts, and release them in two-year intervals. They still can tell the same story they'd tell if it were a game with all three parts, but maybe in a semi-episodic format they can add a bit more content to each part vs. what they could do if it were a full game, and this would also let them get the game out there (at least part of it) sooner. You will still have the fans who want to get each part ASAP, meanwhile you can get more casual fans (old and new) to pick the game up down the line with al three parts packaged together, and that's also when they could bring the game to PC.
Why would this work? Because with a lot of these games, it's the content that takes the most time to make, by far. So having say a 2-year buffer between parts (but each part can feel like a full game in itself, sort of like a Miles Morales or Uncharted 4 Lost Legacy expansion) would give enough time to develop content for the next part. Meanwhile, they can price each part at say $30, which is probably the sweet spot, and treat it the same way they would with the game if it were released "normally". But if you do it in parts, people can start actually playing the game years earlier, and if there are small QOL improvements introduced with latter parts, the older parts can get updates to include them.
Of course, progress would have to be continued between them, but we already see how stuff like the Telltale games do it, or even better one of my favorite games ever, Shining Force III. That's actually the game I'm thinking of a lot while typing this, because even though it's split into three Scenarios, each one practically is a whole game unto itself, and decisions you make in the earlier Scenarios will carry over to the succeeding ones. But more importantly, they all feel like a seamless story and narrative, you don't feel like you're missing cut content, and they have all the things in each Scenario you'd get in a full game (full utilization of game mechanics, full normal challenge/difficulty curve, resolution to multiple (not all) plot points, etc.).
If each part takes 2 years to release, then you first do the normal B2P release at $30 (
maybe $40 depending on the game but that'd be the upper limit), then when the next part is releasing you put it in PS+ for a limited period of time, then release the second part as B2P. Repeat the process until all the parts have been released and had some time in the service, then release them together as a single game on Steam. That'd be a good 4-6 years after initially releasing the parts (or Scenarios if sticking with SF III lingo) on console, and maybe there are additional QOL or bonus content included in the PC release but make that release priced at $50 or $60, and make the additional QOL and bonus content accessible to console owners for a free or small fee. And then 1-2 years later comes another new 1P AAA release for console using that same model.
Honestly I think if they take that approach, and they can combine it with something like a per-game sub model for the digital version (so maybe instead of paying $30 or $40 upfront, you pay $6/mo or $7/mo over a 6-month period, or even $3/mo - $4/mo over a 12-month period, that is a winning formula. The vast majority of the same people who buy the normal games for $70 Day 1 are going to buy the parts/Scenarios Day 1 for $30/$40, plus with the sub option get a lot of people who'd rather had waited until down the line to buy the game, to pick it up Day 1 as well. And since these would be digital sales, that means more profit each copy.
In fact, I think with the per-game sub option in particular it could free Sony up to change up stuff with PS+, such as getting rid of the online paywall on console, because even if some notable number of people drop PS+ Essentials as a result, they are very likely going to shift that spending towards buying more games Day 1 between both, say, 1P AAA games being broken up into parts/Scenarios and priced cheaper per-part/Scenario, and the sub option that can compound with that. Not all 1P AAA games can probably be broken up this way; I think something like Gran Turismo for example could only be separated in terms of the single-player and multi-player and that's it. But I'm mainly thinking of the story-heavy titles anyway.