Active Player Count?

What we're saying is: Steam is also great for people who have friends who play games and want to keep up with what games their friends are playing; playing through Steam costs nothing extra and is free advertising.

 

This is very encouraging!

 

Nothing extra for the player, it costs the developer a bit. Generally those rewards (common platform, massive advertising and market) are worth it.

 

My main avatar,this one is linked to Steam,where it says I own 184 games. It also says I have played this game 1,711 hours. Now do you want to know what that doesn't tell you? I have 5 stand alone accounts not tied to Steam and know other players who have much more than that. So anytime I am on one of those accounts,Steam knows nothing about it. It never records it,never keeps record of it. And before someone start to quote the records Shroud has,the discussion didn't invole Shroud's numbers,it was Steams numbers. If you have one Steam account, if have never been able to run more than one instance of the game. You can run as many stand alone clients as your computer and ISP can handle.

And @E n v y thank you for your like clockwork doom and gloom about the game and the state it's in. If nothing else,you can always be counted on to randomly show up and never have one good thing to say about anything involving the game. I have games I dislike as much as it seems you dislike SotA, but I am never on those forums. To each his own I guess.

 

Well unfortunately I dropped a significant amount of cash into this project, of course I am going to keep an eye on what is going on. I'm sorry that my opinion and view makes you 'feel' sad, you can always make me an offer on 14 accounts, 5 PoTs and god knows how many rent free houses (il still keep 1 account and a PoT for my amusement), I figure by reducing my holding I would be less inclined to comment or even care about the game.

 

I much prefer the GOG community, and it's population is probably a better target market for this than Steam is. I'd very happily link my SotA account to my GOG account if that were an option, but I have no interest in Steam. It's only use for me is to get the occasional Humble Bundle offering that doesn't come packaged any other way.

 

What does playing through Steam cost the developer? Remember that you can link your Portalarium account to Steam without paying Steam a penny.

 

I hear that Albion is too laggy, there is server downtime, restarts and even rollbacks. That's probably why he has so much time to be on the SOTA forum... I am seeing a lot of negative comments on the Albion forum.

 

I agree there are server issues on Albion atm.....not seen a rollback though and i've been playing a hell of a lot since launch. To be fair the current downtime during a session is probably no different that the combined scene change load times during a session in SotA.

First world problems I guess.......kind of issues you get when you have sooooooo many people logging into the game. Most single scenes have more players contained within them then the entire average playerbase of Shroud.

 

I was under the impression that linked accounts would have a percentage of all transactions sent to steam. I could be wrong and Port is just using steam for their bandwidth but I'd not expect that service to be provided for free.

 

You said that the summer is the cause for the low population because people tend to do other things in summer. Yet I showed that despite summer many people are playing games. But if less people are playing in summer then the Player count for all games should go up in autumn. Or is this a phenomenon exclusive to SotA?

 

The Albion forum is a cesspit. If you take a look at the forum nobody is playing Albion and everybody wants his money back.

But if you log in you see hundreds of people in every scene.

Telling, isn't it? What can that teach us about this forum and the internet at large.

 

Look, I like Steam. Love a lot of features of it. It does not mean that the majority of gamers use it. I've had my account since Half-Life 2 came out and offered the service with the bundle. Since then I've acquired games on Steam but mostly get hard copies for my collection. In the early days there were many problems of "having to connect" to Steam to play your stuff and that really turned off some people. They've fixed a lot of those problems but it hasn't changed players views on the stance across the board.

Just because you may like it doesn't mean everyone should be doing it. There are still more non-Steam players of SotA than there are Steam SotA players. It may catch up and overshoot the number in the future, but for now it is what it is. There are plenty of games out there that make you play with Steam accounts for whatever reason. There are plenty more that do not. It's purely a preference at the moment if you want to play through Steam. There is nothing really for it like some other games, say, Civilization IV or the like with community hubs and mods you can easily access and use through Steam. There are plenty of other ways to get statistics other than Steam.

Plenty of games out there that do not use or go through Steam. I use MMORPG.com just to check up on all the MMO types and there are plenty more out there. Steam is, however, doing a great job of getting older games published and running on newer systems. Kudos for that.

 

What are the reasons they would have listed SotA on Steam?

 

I have two accounts. One is linked to Steam but I never play it through Steam.

 

I'm happy you check in

 

First, the average active player count on steam was 128 in the last 30 days, not 90.

Secondly, as it has already been said, Steam charts are only showing the "average number of people connected to the game at a given time". This means that when you play the game (during summer time and holidays), you can expect Novia to be filled with 128 players (plus non-steam players). That doesn't mean that SotA only has 128 active players on steam.

Taking into account the fact that players play 2/3 hours each day on average, that means that the player base on steam is 1000-1500 players, approximatively. More if the average play time is smaller.

 

At least for me, the odds of an encounter with others (encounter meaning some form of interaction) plays an important role for enjoying a M(assively)M(ultiplayer)orpg. If that wasn't the case, I'd be playing a normal, single player cRPG. I don't need DOTA2 or CounterStrike numbers, but I'd love to meet several people an hour, instead of one person each several hours.

I am intentionally holding out on a review until 'official release' to give Portalarium a fair chance. Right now, my review would be devastating, since I'd be judging the game by Lord British's own standards. But that's likely a topic for another thread.

 

I think the Albion forum is lovely

 

I have one Steam account, my KS SOTA account linked to the Steam account, and one account through the website, 2 total. Yet I can use my singular Steam account, play the game, and then log into either account at the login page. And that second account was never tied to a Steam account. So for me Steam knows both of my account's play times together under my single Steam account.