PA Stats usage statistics

This, i haven't played much because of uni, Australia's about to go into Summer/ Christmas holidays, so lots of us will be playing more.

Out of curiosity....I wonder how many people on this site are Australian? I'm an Aussie (Melbourne) and it seems like we have a oddly high representation here.

I've noticed that too. It might have something to do with how our tastes are closer to British tastes? I've noticed TA-style games seem to have unusually large representation from Britain and Germany as well.

We should find stats on this.

See my edit in your quote. The raw numbers don't say that much, just as the steam stats alone don't, as they don't include any players who don't use steam. That's why the trend is the main thing, as that can be extrapolated with probably a fair degree of accuracy.

Edit: Australian here, too.

I don't see how the active player base is currently supposed to pay for further development either way. By buying commanders? I doubt that. No for Uber it matters how much more copies they can sell so far at least.
The size of the only community, as well as the "climate" within in have a more or less big effect on that.

You should catch up with team burning then @mishtakashi and co are all a really good bunch of guys (and gals) based in Aus / NZ. They're all fairly active too... and have an ongoing friendly rivalry with Promethean (which we're *just* winning so far haha)...

Colin, your bias is showing. I was going to leave this to a simple comment in a buried thread, but you clearly have an agenda here. These graphs don't tell the story you want them to, no matter how hard you try.

First, total usage counts are not really informative in terms of revenue. I'd look at new users per day for this. If you think 15-20 new users per day (which of course will not all be new purchases- many will be just late downloads of PAMM) is enough to support a development company long term, i've got a tower in Paris i'd like to sell you. The combined PAMM and steam usage statistics tell a pretty clear story: usage and purchase are on the decline and were paltry to begin with. Which fits exactly the posting profile of the forum - we're being whittled down to all but the most hardcore users.

You can call it doom and gloom all you want, i'm just being realistic about the state of the union. Even the total seen stats are far from impressive.

An interesting observation; the release spike in active users per day (~100 -> ~250) clearly doesn't match the much smaller spike in new users per day (5-35). We can reason that the majority of the post-release bump came from early backers who were checking back in rather than new purchases. All three graphs show the same story: a steady recession to pre-release active user levels.

I wouldn't call a 1,000 player release spike with 20-30 new players per day, followed by a clear downward trend 'growth'.

That is a dead cat bounce if I ever saw one.

Can we stop killing cats please? You're making me nervous.

I think your being overly negative in your assessment. The statistics that @cola_colin have clearly show an upward trend in number of players seen- so I think the actual number of people *playing the game* for multiplayer is going up rather than down. It isn't a huge number of players, but it was never going to be. RTS is a fairly niche genre, and having played TA, Spring and SupCom (to a lesser extent) online, none of these games had huge followings so what we're seing for PA isn't unexpected (and is why PA needed a Kickstarter in the first place).

You are correct in your assumption that the game does need to generate sales to be sucessful long term- and we really don't have the numbers on that to make any conclusions. Uber are aware of the potential risks with this (and the simple fact is that they may not be able to maintain it long term) so you'll note that they have been pretty good at getting support features in place to allow us, the community, to support the game long term if we need to.

The reality of it is that at some point Uber will have to stop developing the game, and that may be sooner rather than later, though I think reading between the lines and looking at how they're operating they're hoping to keep bumping PA back up the sales charts with each update. Whilst that continues to work they'll be able to continue. The thing is though, with pretty comprehensive mod support and the incoming custom map editor- I think we're getting to the stage where long term community based support is viable. Many people *don't like* that idea- but coming from Spring it doesn't worry me. Don't like vannilla balance? There's a mod for that! Also once Uber stop officially supporting the game I think the community will probably get control over vanilla balance anyway.

Uber have actually been very kind / forward looking in the development of PA which will ensure the game has a future one way or another.

Relative to September there is a clear downward trend. And growth is best characterised by the rate of growth not the absolute high water mark. By these two metrics, the data Colin provided, and the Steam Data PA is experiencing neither long term nor short term growth of a significant nature. If he provides the data I'd do some quick regression analyses to demonstrate this, but i'm currently swamped mapping auditory cortex in 50 subjects, so it would be at least a month before I could get around to it. It is also true we don't have all the data; but collectively PA stats and Steam paint a relatively representative picture. You can interpret those trends however you like, i'm just pointing them out.

Also just to address the bit about my motivations, they are quite simple: we need to have a reasonably accurate expectation of how long Uber can support PA to prepare for the inevitable shift of burden to the community. We don't need a super clear picture or timeline, but sticking our head in the sand won't help anything. I'm quite sure that Uber will continue to develop PA so long as they remain financially solvent; the question here is what is going to happen when that time (inevitably) comes.

Based on the data revealed here, i'd give it 1 year max on the highly optimistic side, barring some hail mary play from Uber. Please quote this post in one year to let me know how well my model fits the world.

They can do a lot in 1 year, remember they made it in 2 !

Why am I not surprised to find a few people to stay true to their nature and paint a picture of doom. Biased? I'd tell you the same really, going around interpret everything you can in the most negative way possible.
But ofc a graph that goes upwards has nothing to do with growth. How dare I. Ofc after the release peak there is a down-ward trend. Just like after any other peak. Doesn't change the fact we are still at a level that is pretty much higher than before release. Look at how the decline after the GW update was faster than it is now. Seems more people stick around this time?

It's really beyond me how people can like something and at the same time are sooo damn persistent about telling the world it will fail.

Calm down. Take a deep breath. And stop projecting your frustration on me. I'm not spreading doom and gloom i'm just advocating for realism. I work with complex data for a living. Describing those trends as 'goes upwards' is a vast over simplification, I'm sure you will realize this once you stop venting at me.

You need to understand that I am in no way blowing the horn of doom. If uber goes out of business or can no longer support PA there is no reason to assume it is the end of the game. Your own fantastic modding work shows that much. I'm just trying to have a reasonable and unbiased discussion about the data you presented. I've got to run but will come back to this when a derail is less likely.

That is an amazing thing you say there, considering how you interpret a clearly growing number as a decline, I honestly don't get that part. The amount of people using pa stats is growing. That statement is proven to be true simply by looking at how many players use it. What you are doing is you make assumptions based on the fact that it is not constantly growing, but it does jumps up and then more or less hard declines. We currently are behind a jump and thus in a phase of declines, if you look at the last few weeks alone indeed.
The question is: Will it make another peak after some other update? I can't see why not, but that is pure speculation and I am sure you will assume it will never again make any other peak and just constantly decline now.

Also about the relation you are making out between new pa stats users per day and overall pa stats users: I've tried to capture that in another graph, see the 2nd last graph in the OP. I'd say it shows that the peak after release was made up of a considerable amount of new players, not just old players returning.

In the name of a calm and unbiased discussion please stop trying to tell me to calm down, I am thinking calmly over this and I disagree with you based on explanations I have given. No need to make assumptions about my state of mind of each other.
You're free to give a full blown explanation of how the players seen by week graph for example show a decline in players. To me it clearly is growing overall:


If you take away the part of the graph until may 2014 you indeed end up with much less growth, but the decline after the current peak has been slower than the decline after the gw update, it's still entirely possible for it to stop dropping below the low-mark before the release peak.
Only looking at "after september" isn't enough time to make any trustworthy assumptions about that.

I've done a fair bit of statistical analysis in my time as well... and the trend your looking at (i.e. 'after September') is far too short to draw any meaningful conclusions...

What I see is that with each 'major' update, there has been a spike, after which the 'base' level of players remaining has increased a bit.

As for the reduced numbers on Steam- well there is an argument to suggest that the offline update will massively *reduce* the number of visible players. Before that hit, everyone was playing online either via Uber or Steam. Now the offline players don't need to go online at all to play AI / GW if they don't want to.

Either way I agree that at some point it's inevitable that Uber will have to stop serious development of PA and move onto something new. I don't think we need worry too much about them existing as a company- they've proven themselves to be a pretty resilient bunch so as long as they still want to continue I think they'll find a way.

On what basis do you make the claim that 8 weeks of data isn't enough to generate a reliable trend of the current state of growth? That is a totally unsupported claim.

First of all it's been 8 weeks since the September peak. Can you give a strong reason why a weekly sampling rate is the best estimate of current trends? Of course if you average the data over this period you see less fine grain in the trend. 8 weeks of daily measurement is more than enough to make a decent prediction of the current trend as it is right now. Timeseries forecasting is about more than merely fitting a hand drawn line to whatever timescale or dataset best fits your hypothesis. You are totally ignoring the clear drivers of the 'growth' you are putting out for your claim.

To be clear(ish), I am making two claims, one of which you already agree with: we are currently in a down trend (by your own chosen graph we are already back to 1/2 the highwater mark of seen players in less than 8 weeks from release) and the total growth rate of PA has never been overly impressive. Showing that there is a linear positive trend in the total seen players only says that the base is retaining on average more players than it is losing. This tells you almost nothing about the actual growth rate - the week on week change in the acquisition of new players. The slope of the above graph is simply the retention rate. It is surely one metric of the health and growth of the community but it hardly tells the definitive story. Notice that the slope for the new players graph is essentially zero with two outlier spikes. Those spikes that drive the peak and decline cycle you mention are linked to distinct major milestones of the game's development: the release of alpha, beta, gamma, and gold. The major take away aside from a modest (rough eyeball would be something like 250 new seen players per month from your above graph) linear growth there is no underlying acceleration in either the retention or acquisition of new players.

For example, you also completely ignore the Steam data which if anything is sampled from a much larger population then the subset of users who use PA stats and includes the often mentioned single player only data.

As for civility; your last response was, the first was hardly even composed. I am happy to finally have some on this issue so I am willing to continue this discussion and even perform some actual stats if you are interested (post November ). Though I suspect you would rather make your big rhetorical statement and then have it go away. Also I think that is the first time I've ever seen someone literally invent a hand-drawn regression line. Engineers and your terrible statistics training... Will you please share the raw data by PM so I can play with it?

The last couple of weeks have been pretty fun with folks on to play almost every evening - We are getting more US players who keep weird hours coming to our game vox voip also

Pure speculation that PA offline would 'massively' increase the rate of offline play when the trend from before and after release (on steam) was clearly downward. I do reckon that some number of players who quit PA due to poor network connection may have come back but without data on this we are stuck with mere speculation./