? It launched peak COVID. Everyone was at home.
i'm aware.
i'm not saying that the numbers *now* are bad by any means, but virtually every early access game that has an explosive start tends to basically have sales and activity taper off significantly until 1.0, since that explosive start means you've pretty much also gotten sales from a good chunk of people interested in an Early Access title, hence 1.0 is pretty much the only other point you can have any kind of significant push. that's what i was getting at speculating Ashlands vs 1.0's incidence (or not)
virtually all the long-burn EAs in the past decade or so had the same kind of sales trajectory, maybe with the famous exception for Terraria (although i feel that has largely to do with Terraria largely being a 'minecraft adjacent' game for people who want 'minecraft yet different' and minecraft obviously always has an overwhelming playerbase size)
edit: actually let's expand a little bit more on that since we're on this topic- when a game releases in Early Access there generally are two main goals:
1) make enough money to fund the rest of the game
2) get feedback from how the community interacts with the game so you can nudge development in a direction for the best 1.0 (whether that's final or not) possible. this is essential to several genres, largely the mechanic-heavy ones that absolutely can't be balanced in a vacuum because having it being played by millions of players means balance breaks in ways you could never get from focus-testing (roguelikes, deckbuilders, sruvival games, colony sims are all good examples)
examples like Valheim, Dyson Sphere, etc (and more recently Palworld of course), probably have made more than enough money at their EA launches to literally rescope their respective EAs beyond a prior more conservative scope (which is prudent for a game to make it through to completion - there's no way to predict how much you're going to sell on EA launch). from that point on in terms of $$$ the goal really is to build a 1.0 that maximizes the number of additional sales. anything that happens between those two points are relatively irrelevant from a $$$ perspective
but at the same time the interim content patches *do* need to be able to maintain interest in the existing playerbase, not because it makes money (they aren't GaaS, after all - existing customers do not generate revenue for being engaged with the game except for some small "get your friends to play" rolloff) but moreso so that that active community can continue to provide feedback w.r.t. the game's overall direction, balance, fun factor, pacing, etc. which, as mentioned, builds towards that more ideal 1.0
i think Valheim is in a pretty safe spot in both those cases. i already mentioned, for example, how Mistlands is a far better biome now than the trainwreck it was when that public beta launched (lmao) largely due to first beta then EA community feedback
youtu.be
valheim.com
