The numbers are plummeting as predicted.

That is how every ARPG league ever works ....what are you even saying .

I think it's a bit expected and what was unexpected was the amount of players coming to play the previous league.

Right now I imagine that the players who've played since 0.1 do have a bit of exhaustion. They've seen pretty much everything already, so they just quickly try out some new stuff at the start and then don't play for as long as they did in 0.1, or even 0.2.

The current trajectory is quite similar to 0.2 really. A litte bit steeper.

There just isn't enough content at the moment and that's quite alright. Obviously they're working on it.

Given how many players bought PoE2 and how popular the league starts have been, I am fairly sure that finances-wise, PoE2 has already been a success to GGG.

Consider also that right now PoE2 has about as many players online as PoE1 has had in a year on the first day of a new league. Consider also that PoE2 is vastly more popular on consoles than PoE1, due to PoE1's poor console controls and an UI that is really clunky on a console.

Right now PoE2 has about as much content as PoE1 did in Breach or so. That would have been 2016. Even assuming that back then a more significant portion of players played over the official launcher rather than Steam, it had fewer players than PoE2 has now.

It wasn't until 2018 that PoE1 really sort of exploded, and in like 2024 it had its best year - 11 years after going open beta. Obviously PoE2 wont have the same retention at this stage that PoE1 has had. Tho honestly I remember lots of leagues where PoE1 went to like half the players after 2 weeks from league start. So again, not surprising it happens with PoE2 too.

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tzaeru#0912 เขียน:

[...]
Right now PoE2 has about as much content as PoE1 did in Breach or so. That would have been 2016. Even assuming that back then a more significant portion of players played over the official launcher rather than Steam, it had fewer players than PoE2 has now.

It wasn't until 2018 that PoE1 really sort of exploded
[...]

How can you be sure ?

It took a year for PoE1 to hit 2 million unique players, from its release in April 2012. (At which point you did not need to pay for a beta key any more.)

(PoE2 beat 1 million before even release, and probably 2 within its first month ?)

But then PoE2 had a LOT more advertising, starting from releasing on Steam.

PoE1 hit 12 million unique players in 3 years, by 2015, I'm not even sure PoE2 has managed that yet ?
(Surely GGG would have boasted about hitting 10M players with PoE2 too ?)

In fact I expect that PoE1 has beat Diablo 3 by now (with its 30+M unique players).

P.S.: In 2016 PoE1 had 1 million 'active' players.

How is PoE 2 gonna "explode" exactly? Even during a free weekend the number of players at league start is half of the number it was in December 2024.

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Johny_Snow#4778 เขียน:

How is PoE 2 gonna "explode" exactly? Even during a free weekend the number of players at league start is half of the number it was in December 2024.

It already did. It's a huge success by numbers. It's in top 6 in Steam at the moment, even though the numbers have gone down a lot since league start. And it is also played via its own launcher, via Epic, and on consoles.

Plenty possible that 1.0 launch beats the 0.1 numbers.

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tzaeru#0912 เขียน:

[...]

Good points, but leaving a lot behind twisting a bit (a lot ?) reality.
- PoE2 benefits from PoE1 fame and history, it doesn't have to climb from 0 and build himself an audience.
- Budgets are nowhere near the same, neither should be the experience from the teams.
- Marketing budget for PoE2 is through the roof if you compare to what PoE1 had.
- 0.4 curve is not "a bit" steeper. 0.2 at day 7 had around 75% retention, 0.4 is already at 55%. (retention, console and/or total amount is irrelevant for that metric, we talking about trend)

Could also compare to PoE1 leagues, and not so many of those were so bad. But I don't think it's so relevant to try to compare those, it's more complicated than that.
That said, you can see by yourself PoE1 leagues on this link, it's interesting. You can go back as far as Torment !

League's been out for one week. Massive decline in players due to mainly how crappy this league is. Apparently that's considered success to some people idk.

Lets wait and see the player drop off a month from now. Guarantee you there'll be like 20k total players across all platforms

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willypete6969#9490 เขียน:

League's been out for one week. Massive decline in players due to mainly how crappy this league is. Apparently that's considered success to some people idk.

Lets wait and see the player drop off a month from now. Guarantee you there'll be like 20k total players across all platforms

Yeah, well, despite me being much less negative than some other commenters here in my comments above, I'd agree that despite a new class, this league is lackluster. No real balance changes, the skills and builds that underperformed still underperform. I can think of basically one build that got lifted up and that's toxic growth/poisonburst pathfinder. The campaign is also pretty long, and that makes players exhausted.

I did expect a bit more for the end game. Not sure what exactly. They stated, to quote, "as you know, the improvements to the endgame are a big focus of our next 0.4.0 content update for Path of Exile 2", a couple of months ago. But in the end, the changes are minor. No distillation any more is kinda nice honestly, even tho it's sort of a nerf. It's anyway balanced by the other buffs. But the buffs just don't have much a wow-factor going for them, and even tho there's many of them, they just individually feel inconsequential. Things like changing a range for some node from 6-18% to 12-18%.

The Temple gets pretty old quite fast, and has a long'ish ramp up time, with its unique reward mechanics being extremely RNG, to the point where they are just meaningless to vast majority of players, even those playing to mid level 90s. I reckon that players who play a league like max 100 hours will prolly only do it once or twice, and the players who play 400+ hours per league will be pretty bored with it.

In that sense, I really feel that what sort of failed here was the expectation management. Which is something that game companies tend to fail in, cuz they live off of the hype they can generate, and they need to balance hype generation and not setting players up for too big of a disappointment.

Still, in the grand scale of things, I can see that there's solid steady progress being made. I'm sure a ton of stuff will be significantly improved and the content getting more nuanced after a year more of development.

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Johny_Snow#4778 เขียน:

How is PoE 2 gonna "explode" exactly? Even during a free weekend the number of players at league start is half of the number it was in December 2024.

There was a lot of hype around PoE 2 back then, everyone was talking about it. A lot of time has passed since the novelty wore off. Especially if there was hype at the release, no matter what the game is, there will always be fewer players later, not more. If POE2 were released right now with version 0.4.0, I assure you the online would be the same as 0.1.0, or most likely more because there is more content.

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tzaeru#0912 เขียน:

I think it's a bit expected and what was unexpected was the amount of players coming to play the previous league.

The last league had a free weekend, which was the catalyst for such a large online presence. Many people who had heard of POE2 but for some reason didn't want to buy it jumped into the game, and that was and still is the main reason. A second free weekend won't be as effective because even most of those who didn't buy the game have tried it.