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.