As it says in the title Planetary Annihilation is the top seller on the steam store during the holiday sales. Uber be like
I am genuinely surprised. Particularly ironic that your avatar and chosen picture are, well... ironic. Anyway, this is good, money isn't the only factor fueling game development, talented hands to work on it for example. It definitely is a factor, as it shows with some things like publishing physical copies for sale through Nordic, and the dedication to development completion. It gives me hope, though it is only a number and shouldn't be put on a pedestal as proof of any one thing.
Still when I was playing earlyer during the typical dead time I was a little shooked to see 700 people online.
1100+? 1280+ 1320+ 1400+ 1470+ 1580+ now, what's going on? This is awesome! Edit: Numbers just keep rising. I wonder if it's related to ARKYD.
It does show that "niche gaming" can be quite a profitable area when the niche has been empty for long enough.
I'm excited that there's a whole lot more people right now . They're overestimating system sizes: making 4 player games on 10+ planet systems. They last too long...
I hope they all realized what they bought --- early access beta. I have actually recommended few of my friends NOT to buy yet for this reason.
I have nearly 200 hours played in this "beta early access". I'd actually call it an alpha. A "beta" is supposed to mean that the product is functionally complete and is theoretically ready for release, pending some bugfixes. PA is straight up incomplete, ergo this is an alpha. But it's playable and interesting. If you poke around the Steam "early access" list, though, you'll see a lot of games that are straight up garbage. None of the reviews have more than 2 hours in them and some of them are just bombed with negative reviews. PA is mostly positive and mostly reviews from people with dozens of hours play-time invested. I would suggest that while PA is definitely in alpha stage, it's a good example of what an early access game should be. It's an incomplete game, but it's a game, and one you can spend a lot of time on. Some of the other early access stuff isn't even a game so much as the framework for a possible game that has yet to be invented. If someone is hungry for some RTS action, I'd say PA early access is worth it.