I think the question is a little difficult to answer.
Why are the old players not playing? vs Why is it not getting new players?
The answer would vary quite a bit. Current and previous players will say lack of updates, and a few will say no self-hosted servers.
Why there are no new players? I think would be lack of advertising, game perception and price. I also feel itâs a pretty niche game and really no crafting/building games in the genre have very many players excluding grand-daddy Minecraft.
Its not on Epic, but it is on Steam, but judging by its performance on Steam, you can assume it will by worse on Epic.
As a new player, if you read the forums and Steam reviews would you buy it?
ââlogging in feels like visiting a coma patient. the hospital is otherwise empty. once, few years ago, i think i saw a nurse. she gave me a shrug and ran away.
i still come to change the damn flowers every week.ââ -option is missing from the poll
this game just lack advertisement, never seen Boundless on Steam browsing different categories its tagged with, even if someone looking for such game he will not find it at Steam
I keep saying it but to me boundless is not yet a complete game, it is not that it needs continual updates every week, just a few extra editions that make the game fun to play even if your not emotionally invested in say your own city or a group project you are working on. IMO boundless draws in people who are interested in the concept, not because of what the game currently is, but because of its potential, with the game in its current state you have to bring your own meaning, its a very individualistic affair, and has noting that provides a force or inertia of its own to draw people in or back to the game.
The only real way to collaborate with each other in game is to build something together, this means you are either gathering resources or building a town or city together. For this to work you have to put all the work in yourselves, in a way that is not encouraging any shared narrative on-top of the work you are putting in. If you are building a village in minecraft together, the aim of what you are doing is more than just the thing itself, it is given meaning and flow outside of the simple building of something together, by either the simple mechanics of the game (getting villagers to live in your village, or keeping mobs away) or by the plethora of extra things you can work towards through the many mods available in the game. In boundless the only real progression you are working towards so far is making your crafting or collecting more efficient, which is nice to have, but does not add enough existentialist meaning (or as I put it information complexity) outside of the task you are already putting the work in to do, building.
I donât think this is a bad place to start with such a game, as you need to have great building and collecting mechanics for a shared building MMO, but with-out there being a bit more to it I think it becomes harder to collaborate on a building project with the only depth being the fact that you have built it. You cant in any way flesh out your builds (or the collaborative building project) into some amazing narrative, unless you have already got expert building skills, which your not going to hone unless you have a narrative thread to pull at whilst your thinking about the 800000th grey brick you just placed, and it is to easy to just write the whole game off because of this. Yes you could just be into art for arts sake, but the whole point in art is to have a audience, when it feels like there are only a handful of people involved in the game it would be hard to keep pushing your own personal narrative toward completing that 1000 hour whale you wanted to build above your base when at most you will get a few likes of your screenshot on the forums, and maybe a wave from someone visiting it in game. Even art for art sake needs more that just the potential to make art, and collaborating on building a massive city for it to just sit there and not flow with or grow existential branches is a hard thing to keep pushing at.
I know the only reason I play boundless still is because of the things that have been going on in my real life that i have put in some way into my builds. I get the existential attachment simply through the fact that it is attached to my history, which is beautiful for me, but not something someone else can ever really share in, I think it would only take a handful of updates to bring the level of existential attachment that can flow between different individuals and so turn boundless into a thriving game.
Encase you didnât notice I like these sorts of discussions about boundless, but usually they donât go far, many people donât seem to want to talk about this sort of thing, and just trail off to âI think its complicatedâ or âthe game is finished you can play itâ but I think the more of these conversations we have the better ideas people will have about either updating, or building a better version of boundless in the future.
I really think that boundless in just an unfished game in its current state, and only a few additional mechanics will make it worthy of a bit of advertising, and that they were idiots both with the advert they created, and how soon they put it out. But it is an amazing foundation, and good that the economy and truly invested players are able to setup the beginnings of what could, and may be, an amazing game. I have my own theories on what James and the crew started to realise they were building, I think the true nature of the beast hit them hard and they wanted out personally, but this is just reading between the lines the confusion and exasperation they hid from the public. I would not be at all surprised if they eventually hire James and the team to finish the game and leave the arguments and human side of things to monumental as they clearly hated this side of the MMO and if they had improved it any more there would only be more human mess churning around the game.
I would. Because it looks like fun. Iâve left 2 reviews over the years though. My initial review was a glowing recommendation.
My 2nd review was a negative review, laying out the lack of updates, roadmap, or dev communication.
And letâs not forget the game trailer that shows characters and content from EARLY ACCESS. Itâs terribly misleading.
@Samski there is more to do in Boundless than Minecraft, but they are still both sandboxes in the end. I have collaborated and dealt with more people in Boundless than I have in most games excluding MMORPGs. I have been on so many hunts with so many different people that alone makes the game very collaborative. On top of the fact that some people just like mining and gathering whereas others love building or running shops etc.
I donât think anyone is afraid to talk about the game or itâs state, but anyone who know what was mentioned by James from a development standpoint knows that the game was unfinished as not everything James promised was implemented, and who is to know that James ever would have pushed update 249 as it was pretty questionable as to if it would have ever made it to the live universe.
After sleeping last night, this poll is missing the obvious âIâm bored with the gameâ as an option. Itâs a very common thing with sandbox MMOs sadly. If you give everyone a sandbox, some are going to build a castle, some are going to dig a hole and then some are going to just pee in the sandbox and walkaway ⌠boredom is a thing.
I have to disagree .
âThereâs more to do in boundless than in Minecraftâ.
Just saying mod support and thatâs the answer.
Thereâs no promotion or hype by the owners/employees. Thereâs never any interaction with players or creators, as in: No one reposts playersâ videos or screenshots, no one does dev vids or key giveaways, thereâs no live in-game events. The website and trailer are wrong/broken/out of date, Steam isnât kept up to date and I agree that 50 large Homeworlds is too many (it expanded to 50 when there were 1800-2k players).
Iâll throw out a counterpoint to that. If you have to mod a game to make it more enjoyable, it is already fundamentally flawed. You could spend hours modding minecraft to make it beautifulâŚand it still wouldnât be as good as the Boundless base game.
Minecraft was built on laziness. Notch aimed to provide a base game where players could be as creative as they wanted. It was ingenious and right place right time.
Boundless, while some features beat minecraft. Is still a major timesink with very little reward. THe building aspect is great but once your build is doneâŚwhat is there to do?
Minecraft mods help expand the game further. Reskinning mobs, resizing them, and making em sparkle isnât my idea of adding new and fun/engaging content.
The community is too small to keep me engaged at this point. Even if we reduced the planet numbers, there just arenât enough people to make the game feel alive. The community we have tried to create events and extra content, but the impact just hasnât been enough to pull people in.
The game has good bones and a lot of potential. Maybe one day it will get the updates it needs to shine.
Why am I not playing boundless?
Iâve spent 2000+ hours farming gems/ore/stone while waiting for the Protectors/Guardians/Ruins/Titans. Being an ARPG fan, the direction to farming/painting was not appealing to me. I simply am not the same player I was ten years ago. To be blunt: I am not the ideal boundless player from a marketing perspective.
100% agree with this. I wish there was a community manager that would share images and videos on ALL social media.
Leah use to take images and videos from the forum and post them on the official X(Twitter) boundless account. Any social media presence would be nice. Itâs the cheapest advertising. Cost nothing to share stuff.
If there was a dev in game that could spawn items for ingame events(Oort Seam,Titan skin blocks as the assets are already in the game files). That could be cool.
Some hidden items on exoâs would be amazing to find when exploring. OMG thereâs a chest in this cave with a maxed out lucent hammer or grapple forged by Monty himself. That would be a cool display piece.
Having the universe scale with the population has been a problem Iâve mentioned many times.
But how do you choose what planets will suffer these catastrophic events?
My personal trick to âwantingâ to play more and more Boundless is making your âown contentâ, your own goals. If you love to build then Boundless is unlike any other game. Build a nation and youâll have plenty to do. You need large farms, energy, a military to protect your nation, and so on. Is it real? Nah, but it can help to inspire you for the next builds 
Truthfully, if you can dream it, yu can almost always build it in Boundless!
This is what a âsandboxâ game is.
How you build a nation when thereâs like 30people playing it. Heh.
Also @georgegroeg I suggested hidden treasures many years ago. Never got respond. Lol
I think @Cookviper did some scavenger hunts way back.
Those were the dayzzzzzđ
Iâve got hidden items all over my builds.
My favourite has always been the hidden teaching pie in the dumpster in the slums. 
Even made a few side quests.
Theres always been scavenger hunts. I remember @KArios doing on at EZPZ where my son and I played that one.
@MrsStar does all sorts of events quite often, including scavenger hunts. The maze and the many searches for chests in her builds. Fun stuff.
I am fairly sure we could do things with the world builder to create some interesting things also, but that would require some other things to happen.
