Original Post — Direct link

RoN was a suprise hit. If it never reached more than 5K (the current 24h peak), devs would have been super happy.

It momentarily reaching 20K and being Steam top seller for weeks (during a motherf*ckin' Steam sale, despite being 40$ early access game!!) was a MIRACLE, exceeding the developers wildest dreams.

Also player number drop happens with all new games, more or less. The game is high quality, but very low on content at the moment. People are simply waiting for new content.

Besides, the player numbers aren't that bad.

  • RoN still has over 5K players, so it has retained 25% of it's players
  • Zero Hour, a game this is often compared to, has 286 players peak. Under three hundred, yes.
  • Ground Branch, another game in the genre, has 121 players peak, in last 24h. Oh wow such popularity
  • Squad (well estabilished, finished game with strong community) has 5K just like RoN.
  • Rising Storm 2 Vietnam has 916 players peak
  • Battlefield 2042 had 100K players and now has just 5K, so it retained only 5% in similar timespan. Despite having Portal and all that, way more content than RoN

None of these games are "dead". I used to play Wargame: Red Dragon for years (hardcore RTS, released in 2014) it retained a steady playerbase lingering around 1K for all these years. And it NEVER reached 5K, not even on release, due to it's hardcore nature. It's a great game, many people regard it as best RTS ever made. It has been in "80% off" sale many times, never reached 5K. It still has 1K players in 2022, as I'm writing this, because there's no game to replace it in the RTS genre. It's enough to play multiplayer matches almost around the clock (you only need 10v10 = 20 players for a great match), so the game isn't dead.

Same will happen with RoN, there's simply no game to replace it, unless you want to go back to SWAT4.

This game will never totally "die" until someone makes a better police shooter. It will stay a classic, just like SWAT4, and will not be abandoned by people who love this genre. Especially with mod support.

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about 2 years ago - /u/Gruntr - Direct link

Yeah, it's a very common cycle for early access titles. I'm really hoping that everyone enjoys the work we've put into the new update when it goes live for all players. Ready or Not was definitely a surprise hit for us, especially having released it earlier than we'd liked to. Plus, while the single player currently isn't nearly as fun as coop (since cooperative environments are social), that element will always exist for people to play regardless of player counts.

We don't live and die by our player counts as much as a strictly PVP-based game, for example (see Splitgate, which is a bunch of fun but began to wane in player count after a while).

about 2 years ago - /u/Gruntr - Direct link

Originally posted by spartan11810

If you are losing to Russian fishing 4 you are in trouble

Russian Fishing 4 is GOTY

about 2 years ago - /u/Gruntr - Direct link

Originally posted by Sir_Billington_II

I think it's safe to say that RoN is that breath of fresh air so many of us have been waiting for since like... 2005. As a non-supporter pleb, I'm eagerly waiting for the new update drop.

I appreciate that. I wish I could have played RoN without having a developer mindset sometimes.