It holds little to no merit. Forza Motorsport Steam players are not like Xbox game pass/Xbox store players. Compare the most popular racing games between platforms.
Even though FM is ranked number 3 on Xbox (really 2, Roblox is not a racing game) it’s ranked 36 on steam. Every assetto corsa is ranked higher. NFS Unbound is ranked higher. The crew is ranked higher. It’s completely reversed on Xbox. You cannot make a correlation here because the audiences and their preferences are completely different. It may be losing popularity on Steam but Steam players never really played or liked it on Steam to begin with
If you buy a PS5 it comes with a controller. You can buy PlayStation 5 controllers at Apple Stores. Barely anyone gets them from there. You can’t take the low PS5 controller sales numbers in Apple stores and say that PlayStation is dying because that’s simply not true. It just means that it’s unpopular with that specific customer, especially when those customers can get controllers at a better deal elsewhere
You can say the same thing about Steam. If you want to count rocket league as a racing game it’s the 59th most popular game on Steam right now. The next game up? BeamNG Drive in 79th place. The PC favorite Assetto Corsa is the 129th most popular game at the time of me writing this. Racing games are not popular in general
Sure, Steam charts don’t tell the whole story, but I also have not seen any evidence of a high player count across platforms.
• The game has been out for over a year, and most leaderboards are not heavily populated.
• The game doesn’t have enough single-player content to keep single-player gamers busy for long.
• Public multiplayer lobbies rarely seem full despite only having a small selection of lobbies to choose from.
• There are not many high-quality liveries available to download in-game since painters are not as plentiful & prolific as they’ve been in prior installments.
• It’s not exactly a bustling community across forums & social media.
No matter how much anyone might love the game, I don’t see how anyone could convincingly argue that it’s a popularly-played game.
…Although, the company pointed out that the early player counts for this installment were higher than any prior installments at their respective launches - which seems easily attributable to the fact that this installment was the first in this series to be included at launch as part of a game subscription service (Game Pass) & could be sampled at no additional cost to subscribers.
Perhaps, but this isn’t about the genre in general, this is about Forza Motorsport 2023. And the fact is that Forza Horizon 5, also a racing game, sits very comfortably on that XBox chart along with Rocket League, while Motorsport 2023 fell off that chart in January of this year and hasn’t been seen since.
Broader appeal? Forza horizon has easier to handle arcade physics, licensed music, and an open world. It’s less of a racing game and more of an open world RPG with cars. Tons of people play that game just to socialize and hang out
Dance around it all you like, but the ball was dropped quite impressively by Turn 10 with this game. Their actions from the beginning of the year forward are solid testimony towards that. A first-party title designed specifically for a certain platform and released at a point where most options in it’s genre are either too niche or too old should have very little problem finding and holding a position near the top of that platform’s offerings. But not this game - this game was in free-fall for months until heavy discounts and a couple of hyped updates managed to stop the bleeding, but only just. Meanwhile, Gran Turismo 7 is still one of the Playstation Store’s top selling games, and during the period I was really tracking things, it never left the top 10, despite releasing a year earlier than Motorsport 2023.
I’m not dancing around anything. You just want to chalk the game up as being dead even though you play it, signed up for the forums, post in it actively, and are an insider
I just started playing again after having it uninstalled since mid-February. And yes, I did sign up for the Insider program, but I’m not going to let that color my current or future experiences with this game; in fact, I signed up because I want to make sure my voice is heard as someone over at Turn 10 tries to salvage whatever they can from this situation.
I didn’t even wanna make a real point with that Steam graphic. I simply know there were 300 players and less but now it’s 550 ish. I think that is a good thing. I play it on PC and I know I am a minority.
So I only drive MP TCR LOBBY, and when I’m out in the evening, I drive around 25 races and when I read all the different GTs, I come up with around 150 new GTs in the evening. Which doesn’t mean that there are only 250 people who drive FM, plus all the other MP LOBBYS and the private lobbies, then there are those who only drive HOT LAP. I would say that there are definitely 3000 to 4000 people out in FM every day.
I really don’t understand why numbers are even remotely important to people at this point. So what if the numbers skyrocket all of a sudden? Will that make you feel good about your ownership or something? Does that give you bragging rights maybe if you’re having dinner with your friends and they happen to be GT7 fans?
I really don’t get it. You have the game. Try to enjoy it. It does have its moments.
The game being popular does have a direct correlation to how much you can enjoy it. Lobby sizes being the biggest deal, but also tunes, liveries and LB’s.
Also think it’s fair to say that if more people were playing then we’d get more content, better QOL features like stats, quicker development and more licensed content. if nobody plays there simply isn’t the budget for all of that
Yes stream charts are obviously not a true reflection of the actual player count, just as most first party titles on GP won’t be but it does give an insight as to how popular it is compared to others. Not an ideal point but it’s all we got, and frankly it’s depressing.
The number of players is important for the near future of a game, if it’s still worth it to further support it with updates etc. games that barely anyone plays end up with no support etc.
As I already said, in my opinion the number has increased, it didn’t decrease.
I got a good example, check out Cyberpunk 2077 it’s a singleplayer game only and is DRM free etc. but it still has 40K+ active players and the game is already almost 4 years old.
That game is really popular, I will do another playthrough after I bought a RTX 5080 or 5090, I am still not sure wich one I will buy. The 5090 is sooooo power hungry, I probably buy a 5080.
I use the “Augmented Steam” browser extension and can only recommend it to others. And yes I don’t use Google or DuckDuckGo anymore, Brave is the best browser and search engine.
The active player count has a literally game-changing effect on community-dependent games:
• If we want to race online, it’s better when there are more players to race with instead of empty lobbies.
• If we want to climb leaderboards, it’s better when those leaderboards have lots of entries instead of no competition to gauge our performance against.
• If we want to share & download tunes & liveries, it’s better when there are more players creating & sharing instead of a ghost town.
• If we want to organize events, it’s better when there are more players to participate.
…etc.
This game has nowhere near enough single-player content to keep people engaged for long, which further increases the game’s dependence on community (the active player count).
I don’t know how they ever expected/hoped to keep many players engaged for long when they gutted so many community-based features (auction house, storefronts, gifting, overall leaderboards, clubs, Searchable public custom lobbies, etc.) from a game that also has so little single-player material.
I’d like to offer another angle. What about tweaks to the most popular series (say TC, GT and NASCAR) with EVO packages just like in real life? It could help dissipate some of the familiarity over time that leads some people away maybe.
So I’m talking about “dead” as in boring and repetitive, not unpopular among players (even though I think online lobbies are smaller than they used to be).
It’s clear that doing nothing more than the planned updates will not bring a significant amount of “new blood”, even among OG players who left.
