A Response to Tom Marks's Article, "Opinion: Why You Should Stop Focusing On Player Counts So Much"

Hey Guys, I stumbled upon this article a couple of days ago, but I never got a chance to get around to it. I guess now is a good time to talk about it because I think it's a great topic to talk about and it's an article that is pretty controversial. Let's get right into this!

A little backstory, the editor here, Tom Marks is focusing on the release of LawBreakers and how its upsetting him over the amount of players considering it a dead game. Here are some of his points that stick out to me and I'll give you my thoughts on each point.

• The problem is that most of these people have likely never played the game, but thanks to sites like SteamCharts and the less reliable SteamSpy commenters everywhere can feel empowered to make wide generalizations about the health of any game based on “hard facts.”

*I can see where the author is coming from. Yeah, most people have never played the game because there wasn't a whole lot of promotion done for the game, so unsurprisingly most people haven't even heard of the game. However, SteamCharts is a good indicator as to which games are popular in the Steam community. The last time I checked I didn't even see LawBreakers in the Top Sellers list of Steam 

• If there are enough people playing LawBreakers that you can quickly find a game every time you play (which, in my experience, there are) why does it matter to the people playing it what the size of the player base is?

*I really hate doing this, but I have no other choice. I love to illustrate my points. 

If you don't believe me, you can check out the stats on SteamCharts

The game can hold 10 players per lobby. Additionally, it's not taking into account the amount of players in certain servers, so it's going to take a while to find a match that has players. Must I also add the amount of players in a certain gamemode? What about the game trying to place other players in similar skill levels? I'm not sure if it does that, but either way it's going to take a while to find players.

"Why does it matter to the people playing it what the size of the player base is?" Well, if the player count is too low then how long until these remaining players get bored of the game and move on? 

• "It’s frustrating to see as someone who genuinely enjoys the game, and I imagine downright demoralizing for the developers."

*Okay, this is a valid point. However, I take more sympathy for the developers because you can tell they poured their heart and soul into the game. Let alone the amount of time it took to program this game as well as coming up with the design of the game.

If you had people shit all over your piece of art-yes I consider video games a work of art-then you would be pissed off or even saddened. 

The players on the other hand can simply ignore other people on the internet and continue playing the game. Do you really think fans of Call of Duty care about the haters of the game? Obviously not because the series still sells like hot cakes. The developers can do it as well, but there are people who do give them constructive criticism over the game, so they have to look at the amount of players talking about their games.

• "So my question to the doomsayers is this: Why do you care? Why does declaring a game dead before you even know what it’s like to play add anything of value to the conversation? You’re not the first to say it, you won’t be the last, and you are usually dead wrong."

*I'll tell you why I care. If I see that player counts are low on a game I may buy, then why would I buy a video game with barely anyone playing it? I don't even care if the game is good or not!

Remember Titanfall? Both games were great, but the first game suffered due to its lack of appeal. I remember the player count was high the first week, but it dipped off shortly after. Now, it's practically a ghost town as most people moved on to different games or Titanfall 2.

I would pull out some more of his statements, but I would keep repeating myself. I have nothing against the author. His heart was in the right place, but I just didn't agree with him. Furthermore, his final statement is counter intuitive to the existence of this article. Low player counts will always hurt a game because people will naturally move on to something more popular.

LawBreakers looks like a fun game, but if it stuck to being free-to-play and was released on more platforms then the population of the game would be much higher!

LawBreakers is dying. It's not a dead game...yet.

Till Next Time!!