The truth about AC multiplayer

but it kinda is wrong

it's the same like if you were tracking how many people launched SDK and form there you would say that 50% of the AC customers are modders .. yet maybe 80% of these people only launched it to see what's in there, 10% of the people are only learning how to do suff and remaining 10% is serious modders
so the original quote 50% of AC are modders should be more like 5% of AC customers are (serious) modders and sudenly that "same" data presenst totally different picture

meaning, tracking MP information without any relevance how many hours those people spend in there is totally skewing the overall picture - imo

and this is even before consoles where I think that MP will be even less on PC , so to me I would still go by what Kunos said > 10% of people uses MP in Ac on more serious level, and with consoles this will go below 5% , which makes it not insignificant ( becasue MP players will stick with AC longer ) but it makes it definitely not the prime focus

 

I would say that MP is prime focus, or better formulation would be that SP is not prime focus ... and also that good SP outlives MP ..

 

These numbers have got the same relevance as many Steam Spy numbers of how many different players played AC. And I repeat it once again: The idea behind that project is not tracking and because of that there was no need to waste my free time on counting more as I needed for my idea or for some debugging purposes. The data you see is just a simple misusing of the numbers in my database and I doubt I will extend it for statistic purposes, because it's already a real pain to get simple informations about multiplayer due to already mentioned reasons. Edwin is an extension of my own server tracker I use for the RCD public servers, because I wanted to see who is on it and exact session informations so I can simple check without leaving another server to be able to see the lobby and to put in on the league website.

And in one point you are absolutly wrong: the number of concurrent people online is the most important number for all server owners and people who like playing online. And I'm one of them because I see no real sense to play against AI, no matter which game or genre.

 

where am I wrong about number of concurrent people online ?

it looks funny saying there's 25k people doing MP a month, and a day average shows 700
yes it wasn't weekend

if you really want your numbers to be more relevant, I really think you need to tie them into number of hours a month
I wonder how many of those 25k would "fall out" if you put there something like you have to spend at least on hour online per month

and btw. I never said that the numbers are useless

 

It's overall versus concurrent??? You got 25k different players per month, around 4k to 5k different per day. And in the peak timeframe there are 600 to 700 players online at the same time. You just mixed the numbers up.

 

fair enough,

is there a way to tell how many of the 25k spend at least an hour a month?
although to eliminate testing and all that, it should be at least 10 hour a month

for me as an example, I have something like 500 hours on AC, so it might seem that I do race a lot , but out of those 500 hours 450 is just because of modding , so the number itself is really quite pointless
it needs to be related to something to get true value

 

Straws + clutching

Regardless of what it's for, people are using it online regularly. There would be a thousand reasons why they might be going online and how long for, but in the real world there is no point trying to analyse these things when all we want to know is if people are using MP.

A similar case study would be TV ratings. They don't have to take into account every variable to be valid.

 

Not with the current data and even if I would extend the system it would only be an approximation because I would have to count each hit of a player as the online value between two search cycles. To get accurate data you would need to check each of the over 800 servers every second with all the logic which is needed to detect if somebody is really online (prebooking and crazy parsing of the server answers). You would need a lot of server power (too high costs) to make this possible and I also don't want to stress servers out there because of data which I don't need.

 

This is a really important point, when looking at the ”importance” of the MP scene. It is the online players that give a game its longevity and extended shelf life.

 

but if most players are playing SP .. those MP HC keepers are not gona bring more money .. just play it .. and hardly attract more players specially once AC2 is out ..

 

That's actually not 100% true. Anyone looking to convert from, say, Iracing (purely for example) will likely want to move to another race sim that has a thriving online community.

Game developers in general nowadays put more of an emphasis on MP than SP to the point where many games are dropping SP campaigns / offline content all together. This, I believe, in future will only increase as more and more game titles become official esports. If PCARS with all of its bells and whistle can become an official esport, there's no reason why AC couldn't / shouldn't become one in future especially with the console releases.

 

Totally different game of course, but back in 2005 EA released Battlefield 2, which for all intents and purposes was an online only FPS, with no campaign or single player mode. I actually thought that this was the way of the future, but it hasn't really gone that way. If anything, single player campaigns are coming back in a bigger way.

 

yep todays games are more of a NOW products (services) .. support for necessary time, sell as many copies as posible and move to sequel or another game .. just as most players are not really willing to spent 10 years with one game .. sure simracing games are specific .. there is not that many racing games comming out every year, so they probably keep players attention for longer time .. but still

 

One aspect I have not seen discussed is out of the player who go online, I am one off those, what time online represent on total play time?
Like in my case less than 10%, so out of my almost 1700 hours driving in AC, only 170 were done online.
If you then factor that I am apparently part of a 30% minority, that means the vast majority of hours spent in AC are not online.

I read somewhere in this thread that only 12.5 % of all the people who installed and presumably purchased AC are still playing or have played in the last 2 month, which is about the same. If this is true, I find it puzzling, border line alarming.

 

Its called Dream Packs and the hardcore players will purchase it.

So instead of playing the number game of x,y,z % is too low ergo not much attention given they d better look at some early on examples like LFS.Why did it lasted even to this day?Cause of the minorities.The small number of ppl that actually cared enough to keep it running and enjoy it.

So as always numbers lie or if you find it too much they dont always teel the truth about things and ppls choices.

 

I wouldn't consider LFS successfull title .. popular among very few people, but not successful

and let's also not forget that huge amount of content in that game wasn't licensed , therefore the costs of making that game would have been way higher if it was, and in that case - perhaps - the small minoiry won't be able to "carry it" for that long

 

Interesting... I would call LFS a great success because of the facts that it is still alive after 13 years (?) now, it was some time a very popular esport title in the ESL and developed by a such a small team that Kunos is big in comparison.

The numbers are impressive at LFSWorld, although many playtime was sure done with the demo. I don't know any numbers for sold copies but I doubt that it is much less than for example AC.

 

If I'm an online player, and I want to keep joining servers with the latest content, I HAVE TO buy the DLC. An SP player might be totally happy without buying any DLC. There's no need for them to buy it. So I would argue the exact opposite is true.

 

How many math classes did you have in your life? Percents are meaningles without the number you apply them to. To quote the author of this little statistic:

As you can see the same number of players can be either 10 or 30%. Depends how you define the playerbase.

Four pages of arguing about practically the same number on both sides. I'd say the thread is hilarious, not depressing.

 

The number can't be 10% when there were at least 12.5% (of all owners) online in the last two months. I know a couple of guys who quit AC and return to iRacing or whatever and we are talking about 2 years of unknowed data here. So assuming the 10% was correct one year ago, the changes to multiplayer helped a lot to make it much more attractive to the playerbase.