johnnylump 23 points 5 months ago
We don't regard it as a failure by any stretch.
Some numbers, all gleaned from publically available sources; I don't have any inside knowledge on how many XCOMs sold:
SteamSpy says XCOM has 2.93 million players. Steam achievements suggest that 71.4% of players got anywhere at all in the game (specifically, shooting down a UFO), and about 27% finished it with a campaign victory. If we define our potential audience as people who have finished the base campaign, that's roughly 791,000 players. Long War has 345,000 unique DLs on the Nexus, and another 15,000 on ModDb. That means we hit about 45.5% of the potential audience and 12.2% of all players.
Certainly we don't think only people who finished the game looked at our mods, but I'm using that as a proxy for the proportion of the vanilla playerbase of both games who would consider overhauls like ours.
SteamSpy says XCOM2 has almost 1.6 million players. Steam achievements indicate that 73% of players got anywhere in the game (contacting a region) and 33% finished it with a win. So by the same yardstick, our potential audience is 528,000 players.
Long War 2 peaked at around 265,000 concurrent players on Steam (it dropped below 250k when WotC came out and is currently at 255k). It has about 35,000 unique DLs on the Nexus. I don't have information on how many unique DLs we had on Steam, only that the mod page has 462k unique visitors -- so our total reach is certainly higher (with a notional bound at 462k from Steam), but we'll use 290k players as a very conservative baseline. That means we reached at least 54.9% of our potential audience and 18.1% of all players.
There are certainly points to question this methodology, but it's the best I've come up with, and I don't have better data that I'm holding back on. The accuracy of SteamSpy data is occasionally challenged, so the percentages assume any errors in their data is working the same way for XCOM and XCOM 2.
Probably the biggest flaw in this comparison is that LW spanned both EU and EW, with its main success coming after EW's release, meaning it mainly drew from the subset of the 2.93 million XCOM players who bought EW. Steam achievements suggest about a quarter of players did a genemod or chopped a trooper, which indicates 732,000 players got anywhere with EW installed, so we probably reached close to half of that group with Long War (by subtracting out a rough estimate of EU-only Long Warriors).
In any event, of course the real success of the mods are in the players' enjoyment of them, not just how many clicked a download button, but that's something I'll let you all work out.
. In exchange, the mod variety is impressive, although I was wondering if there was a way to make vanilla game harder to compensate for a larger squad (say 10 soldiers) without forcibly increasing the number of enemy pods appearing, as that invariably degenerates into situations like 8 sectoids cramped into a corner of an UFO, which is not okay. I know the WOTC expansion has a better mod about this, but not so much for the vanilla game. Thus, what are you recommendations to make the game harder quality-wise rather than quantity, people?
