It's one those things like was it right of them to do it or even fair? No but will it hurt them? Hell no. The games now on PS4/360 and PC and I'm sure is slowly growing to the 10 Million mark if not hit it by now on the consoles + the 5mil almost on PC. That being said I rage quit the game when Dino's spawned inside my base actually right inside an enclosed base and killed everything set to passive. The game is one the most buggy games out there at least with major components for a game that is release or being released very soon.
You obviously have not played many games if you think ARK is the most buggy game out there, let alone ran any servers for any of them. Now that they hit the mark they wanted with content all their patches are 100% bug fixes/optimization. Even then this is far down the buggiest game list compared to other games out there.
They sold close to 5 million copies and have a player base of 50 to 60 thousand that still play it. The developers chased away most players with bad updates and bad choices. 2 years ago the game was fun to play but now it's terrible.
Empyrion is building a game in a nice order that far exceeds what you can do in Ark considering we have whole solar systems already that we can make any size we like, and you might be surprised to know Empyrion is the quiet achiever with around 45 thousand players as there base, that's 45 thousand in the last two weeks and I have watched this stat window from steam slowly grow in numbers for 2 years now, where will Ark be in 2 years from now and where will Empyrion be......
In two years lots of things can happen, and not only in the gaming world... Empyrion can still use a little polish here and there, it never hurts.
the community in Ark has gotten toxic. if you play on the public servers, then you know what happened when they allowed character transfers. the dominating factions ruined the experience on the new servers, gimping new players who couldn't grind the resources or look after the dinos needed cause the dominant faction blocked everyone else from them. This is old news. Those who are on top, stay on top. New players are at a disadvantage. As for single player, there are mods available, and we can change the timers for things like breeding, hunger, and several other timers that require babysitting every tame Dino, animal, or resource node.
This is what happens when the developers only look at the accounting side of the game. When the multiplayer crowd allows "survival" of the game, they have no more incentive to balance things, especially if just a few new players come in and stick around for a few weeks. Why would they upset their "core" playerbase if they are the ones "satisfied" with the way things work, and revenues are sufficient for the developers that way ?
Empyrion wont go to DLC paid content or micro ingame transactions, our devs have stated it outright. Ark on the other hand is scraping and scabbing as much out of its playerbase as it can while it can cos it can see the writing on the wall...... Why steal from the main bunch of people that support your game for the longest period, kinda seems arrogant to me, at the very least its ignorant by the Ark devs, and its not a formula for keeping players across multiple games you might like to develop later, its blatent money grabbing. If theres issues in development in funding, that's probably a sign of promising to much and delivering to little, NMS is another one of those duds also. I don't want to see them fail, or go broke, but DLC crap at this early stage of a game in EA, ffs, give us a break that's just blatent outright obnoxious theft.
I tried to get some numbers on "SteamSpy" but it doesn't really show much. Ark: owners 5,194,389 ± 60,311 (average playing: between 60k to 100k) - 1.9% Empyrion: owners 377,696 ±16,358 (average playing: between 2k to 6k) - 1.5% The problem is that theses numbers don't take into account all players that play solo in offline mode. Even the "time played" on Steam only tracks time spent in "online" mode.
NMS is an awesome game and a lot of fun, my wife and I both like it a lot. I never played it before a few weeks ago and I never heard any of the bad press before buying it but I'd say the press is all dead wrong if they say it's not a great game. Just my family's opinion.
The "gaming press" and the reviews / metascore are too subjective to be taken seriously. Many very good titles on Steam are badly ranked and some point-n-click cartoon stories get ahead of them just because of voting blitz to take the game to the front page. Young players get all excited on 8 bit "retro-style" games because they never lived the transition from the Atari / Coleco / Nintendo consoles to full 3d computer games. I suspect a bunch of kids just grabbed a copy of "Clickteam Fusion" and made their first games from a tutorial, then they upvote each other's games and downvote gems just to get exposure.
That's why so many owners don't play ark too, but I don't see wc having the needed skills to fix it. At least nms did the extra work and fixed their game.
Ark is a team in disarray , NMS, Hello are a bunch of liers, they absolutely lied outright about the game, and to this very day does not have all of what they promised, they charged an insanely high price for a game with less content than Empyrion at the time, it was a bad joke driven by Sony the one and only jerkoffs and Hello agreeing to be Sony Plebs, they brought there bad press on themselves. They deserved the bad reviews and bad press, MILLIONS of people bought into it, of which from what I can tell only 1/5 of the purchased players actually still play it, going of Steam stats, given there not perfect by any means its still an indication of sheer bitterness in its potential playerbase. The whole NMS ordeal was a very bad joke and damaged EA games in general, there are countless posts and reviews of people stating they will never again trust an EA game or purchase one, ever again. WE ALL LOOSE FROM THIS. The only winner was Sony and Hello. SO I feel like a stupid Pleb for buying that game just to take a look at it and what a disappointment that was. Yea NMS or Sony and Hello can go ..........k ............s. Well done on totally screwing up a GREAT idea with procedural animal generation too. Just sayin....Implementation 2/10 , Idea 10/10..... For NMS to win back all the players they burnt and pissedoff , there game now has to be Outstanding and above and beyond what they really promised, yea I dun recon that'll happen either..... For those that do enjoy it, well done, at least some of us gamers got some value out of it, I don't see it, but personal opinion cant be wrong so to speak so if you enjoy the game, play it !
