What matters are only new purchases, sadly. Microsoft already got the money from all those people who already stopped playing.
If they lose10K, but if enough people bought the new DLC to offset build costs, it’s a win
Unfortunately I have to call you out on this one.
The curve appears to be weekly peak number of players. The most recent data point is weekly average since May 19, which is skewed and incomplete without the upcoming weekend peak.
Could be campaign players coming back and leaving again after they finished 3K, you saw a similar downward trend with AoM’s Immortal Pillars:
No, the nosedive is due to weekly average this week so far only covers time period since Monday and not including the upcoming weekend.
Yes, there is also some regression back to normal level after the players finishing the campaigns, but that’s not what explains the nosedive.
Though the second observation is a plausible evidence that the online player bump during DLC release is mostly campaign players.
Almost every graph of every game has this strange nose dive at the end. That is some issue on the website:
https://steamdb.info/charts/?compare=813780,933110,1466860,1934680
It looks like all games in the series have a nose dive if you set it to 1y.
Also isn’t it obvious that Single player people will stop playing again after they finished the campaign?
Like I said, it’s due to this upcoming weekend not yet being counted. The graph shows maximum weekly numbers:
However every weekend every game gets a generic bump. If you plot by day rather than by week you can see this repeating weekly cycle where online player gets a bump over the weekend:
A few days ago some bomb dude in another thread try to “own the haters” by claiming that the online player is trending up – from Friday to Sunday! I called it out but was told to learn about averages :')