857 steam players added from Jan 2019 to Feb 2019
796 Steam Players Lost from Feb 2019 to March 2019.
Based on these number 61 players remained, 7.11%?
I am not a dev nor do I have access to the official New player purchase vs player retention data. But the steamcharts is the information I am going by.
You will always get people stating that these numbers are “concurrent” players and the game has over 1200 players playing the game currently.
The question that I would have on the free weekend would be, that I truly have no clue of the answer to: when other games do those, what IS the average retention rate of the free players? I’d have to think that there are a lot of people out there who just jump in to try out new stuff for the heck of it.
If it is at least somewhat in line with Boundless’, though absolutely I believe the NPE needs work (and if way out of line then sort of proves there is a huge problem), then I suspect blame for the subsequent trend in the numbers falls more on the promotional front. Might be a niche game, but any niche can be big enough if you get the attention of enough people overall. Though it seems in retrospect the game wouldn’t have been able to handle it, being put out too soon out seems to me to be the other big marketing blunder here. And how many usually jump in free weekends for games coming from comparable-sized studios? I suspect the only difference between the fate of Boundless and NMS was the hype on the latter… gave them enough cash at the outset to continue development; frankly, as much as I love NMS I still personally consider Boundless more enjoyable as a game. They took a lot of risks here and hit on some incredible things, blazed some innovative new trails… but I think for it to really be a big retail success (leaving aside the extreme outset hype/improvements later path of NMS) would have required a lot more testing followed by polishing/balancing then serious marketing efforts. Of course, that’s always hard too because people don’t want to wait in early access too long…
Well according to the Free Weekend mentioned to me the Free Weekend on Steam showed a 35-player increase. As stated to me by many people on the forums Steam is concurrent players.
So, going by what I have been told we have around 100 concurrent players on Steam currently which is “concurrent” so the actual number of players (as I have been told) is more around 1200 players.
Using that math, if we retained 35 “concurrent” players we must have retained around 400 players or so.
I’ll add, part of the reason I’m eyeing the marketing side of it more, and am wondering if our free weekend retention % lines up with other games - it is such a tough market right now in general, seems you either have to be AAA or get some serious influencer/streamer clout to have a decent chance, and also, what I’ve seen with a game that has very similar numbers (Boundless may have more if you count PS players), somewhat similar in type of game, and actually IS F2P: Creativerse. You can enjoy that game in it’s free form fine, NPE is almost as easy as MC, they added in some very cool features like programmable NPCs… but it just never got the numbers. And I see the same thing with Boundless: you just don’t see that game out there much, and it is hard trying to crack into established games’ niches even if you are being innovative in a lot of ways and not copying the whole formula.
Everybody always points to stuff like Stardew Valley, where one person or a small team create a huge hit. But that is the BIG exception. And a lot of the small, organic big success stories are not from recent years. Look at how many new games are dropping on Steam constantly. The market is saturated, gamers are jaded, and there is only so much $ to go around. My overall impression is that success now often comes as the result of being a big, recognized game or connected to one, or being able, whether through the potential merits of your game, luck, or money to manage get a lot of press/coverage/sharing out there (Stray comes to mind here recently, got tons of coverage, because hey, who doesn’t love 
s? While liking and aww’ing at the game myself, I actually don’t see much other than being a cat that is particularly innovative or technically impressive there so far). There are tons of great games out or in the works that I see that just are not getting attention, follows from people, ect… very sad to me as I WANT indie passion projects to succeed and to have tons of wonderful games out there!
@bucfanpaka You are pretty spot on. There is one other thing that can really change a game’s success and that is the ability of it to generate good content for a Streamer.
I say this as I watch a few Streamers that have an audience of 20K+ per stream on Twitch. I have watched one in particular get into gaming ruts and their 20k+ viewers will watch as the streamer browses Steam for a game and then this person will look at the “currently playing” number and based on the Players Online, the trailer and some quick reviews they would choose to try the game out.
I mention this because this streamer kind of jumps between some games they always play. Rust, DayZ, and a number of others. I mention this because… when this streamer plays them there is direct correlation with a Steam sales increase and this streamer playing the game again and also another correlation with the Steam stats for the game the streamer plays.
Streamers (large streamers) are an underused marketing tool and it would take one large streamer to really push a game and make it popular. The downside of course is always player retention, but I have watched the streamer leave and go back to games over and over and the sales and playerbase jump up every time and the average player base even after the streamer leaves stays at a higher level than it was previously.
Pretty crazy how one large Streamer can make or break a game.
EDIT: Figured I’d add we always argue that all the stats we know of are “concurrent”, but concurrent or not that number is used by TONS of people to decide if they want to buy/try a game out.
I’m only responding since you have mentioned it a few times.
The only time, IMO, that this difference matters is when someone is talking about total number of players playing. Max concurrent is a valuable way to compare vs other games’ max concurrent, or to determine approximate percentage change in population. It just isn’t good at telling you the actual number of people who play the game in general.
My wife and I just came back to Boundless. We got a sovereign and I set up a market selling animal parts. It’s off the beaten path from our main settlement. I can’t keep it stocked with certain things. Bones, meat, etc., are all priced fairly but not below the general market. We aren’t “big boys”. It’s quite possible to be part of the economy on a small scale.
I haven’t seen anyone address the most obvious negative effect of F2P in Boundless, even after grazing around it with the free weekend references…
Dead beacons. Everywhere. If you get 50k players to download the game for free and only 10k play for more than a month, that’s FORTY THOUSAND dead beacons in the live servers. Every city, every hub, every everything, will be blocked from expansion. Only sovereigns are safe.
Would never work. I think $15-20 is the money zone to attract players that will hopefully spend more in game.
I think it was addressed when it was stated by a few of us that the current infrastructure and lack of in-game support from the devs or a community manager cannot support the game going Free 2 Play.
Dead beacons… everywhere. Almost as bad as empty plotted beacons everywhere.
I don’t believe anyone is saying that looking at the concurrent numbers is useless or bad data. It’s just very time-specific and is partial data. It’s not correct to refer to it as the “total number of players”.
Additionally, it doesn’t include Playstation players, nor players on Exos or Sovereigns (IIRC).
For example, if you looked at it at 3am on Tuesday. It might show 5 concurrent players. That doesn’t mean there are only 5 players. Just 5 at the moment you looked at the data.
The average daily concurrent player data could help give someone a vague guess as to the overall average number of current active players. Probably more accurate and useful for AAA title games in the top 25 list though. I’m sure most steam players and streamers do check out this info. If they stream something in the top 100, they have a higher probability of obtaining a sponsorship, signing to a team, and/or monetizing viewership.
I agree it would be great if a mid/high level streamer would pick BL up for a little bit 
. Or if they had a sales executive that would offer academic discounts to school districts, etc. I also think adding a platform would be helpful…XBox or Switch.
This is where starter and/or demo tutorial planets would be helpful, imo.
So about how the game is right now?
Following along that line of reason, I’ll give an example. WoW offers a free to play, trial experience up to level 20. If you want to progress beyond that, you have to get a subscription.
Boundless could do something similar. Free up to a certain level, if you want to progress beyond that, buy the game. Limit the trial players to basic beacon fuel. Restrict purchase of cubits or gleam club until you purchase the game.
It could work.
This is not very effective either. And it’s highly dependent on how you describe ‘active’.
To measure both player activity and engagement levels it would be best to have stats like “daily active users” or “weekly”, “monthly”, etc …
Then we could listen to “logging in monthly to fuel beacons isn’t ‘active’” from the player base while the team sits at a meeting and discusses how likely it is that someone who logs in once a month to fuel will just say “ah !@#$ it” and buy gleam club.
Whatever though I’m avoiding people IRL same is fine for boundless, for the most part. I think a good number of the people who complain “the game seems empty” have never been blocked off of half the universe by full planets or sold their oort for 100c due to market flooding 
50k, 10k, 40k, 2billion, what?
Max capacity of the public universe is around 4500 peeps.
It’s worth noting that quite a few troll accounts were also created. Something else nobody has metrics on. I wonder how many existing players “free” alt/troll accounts were among those that lasted 
After all there weren’t really dollar keys back then either.
Yep it’s been a while (obviously) since james said anything. When he posted there were 3k MAU it was already pretty surprising, considering what concurrent numbers had been looking like. The announcements last month caused a bit of a ruckus. I wonder what the count would be for “logged in during june/july 2022”.
Like, meaningful data, you know?
Edit: yeah early 2020, over a year since the free weekend at that post.
we would get more permanent world if that would be the case.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that wonderstruck isn’t currently in a position to launch 10x the universe for a free promo, though.
Can’t be sure of course, I have no idea how many public/sov worlds they’ve combined onto an instance successfully.
I don’t think either, unless they will have some type of “sponsor” coming.
I didn’t need to inflate the numbers that much but my point is that this isn’t the type of game people can just “check out”, which is what people do with free games. I will say free weekend was the worst possible scenario since those people didn’t get to keep the game for free, but if it became permanently free to play and advertised we would have a regular flow of people who play for a night then quit.
At least until local mode is live. @majorvex I think this could be where the tutorial world concept comes in.
Honestly wonder about the idea of having the game be super cheap as opposed to free.
Pretty much everyone here has hundreds (if not thousands) of hours in the game and would agree its worth every penny, however trying to attract a new player to a self described “mmo” where the player count hovers in the hundreds total (or single digits for most individual planets) is extremely difficult.
Hypothetically, if the game was $5 or $10, it would attract a lot more people whilest still acting as a deterrent to griefers.
Alternatively as has been mentioned, having some sort of free trial or free accounts with restrictions:
This could act as a great means of boosting player numbers which the game despretely needs without having thousands of ever-lasting plots everywhere.