Ikeren wrote:I mean, does the game actually need to get bigger? There is a large enough player pool at the moment that I can pick up almost any game style I want on the inside of a week?
The 1100 province game with 75 to all magic sites and crazy mods didn't get the 23 players it shot for, but is going decently with 12 on turn 70 (the first few players got eliminated). But normal style games fill up pretty fast.
The issue here is that the "core" of the community - meaning the Dom3Mods people - are all currently very invested in supporting Dominions 5.
The problem is that they aren't the majority of the base by a very wide margin; only the most vocal and visible portion. The rest of the base are more casual players and are not as likely to be ready to migrate to a new game. Hence a new game might actually reduce the number of people available for pick-up games, because it results in a split between those who migrate to Dom5 and those who stick with Dom4.
That's really the big issue with a lot of modern games in general. Vocal minorities tend to widely distort what the majority of players actually want or need, because Devs fall into the trap of thinking that the vocal base is representative of the larger whole instead of the more time-consuming effort of actually seeking regular players (particularly those with negative feedback).
I saw the same situation play out during the release of
Steel Division. The game had a really vocal and hostile base of players from the developer's previous games (Wargame) who were demanding all sorts of changes regarding "balance", adding special Wehrmacht obscure prototypes, or whatnot, so the devs spent the first couple of patches on these "issues".
However it turned out that less than 1/3 of Steel Division purchasers ever bought a Wargame title and less than one in twenty had even played Wargame in the past month (based on readily available stats). The real problem was that the majority of the game's purchasers were new blood - folks who have played Hearts of Iron or Total War - and were totally unfamiliar with how unforgiving a multiplayer RTS can be especially given the tutorials and single player missions were pretty bad.
By the time the Devs figured out they had to fix the tutorials and single player missions, it was pretty much too late. The game's sales had already stagnated and the playerbase pretty much collapsed.