Realistic expectations...

So yesterday there was a big post debating the pros/cons of this game being B2P vs F2P and while I see both sides of that argument, I think it also important to frame it within the expectations of a project like this.

First I think it's important to note that this re-release was never planned to make a big dent in the MOBA scene. It is absolutely evident that the amount of effort and resources put into this re-release was minimal (if that lol). Now the good news on that front is that they do not need the game to be very successful to recoup these costs.

Second, I think a lot of people have different ideas of what this game "NEEDS" to be in order to "make it". The reality is this will never be DOTA or LOL, but as pointed out it doesnt need to be. Really, if there is a daily peak of around 2k players on steam and another 2k from console (this is a guestimate since we dont have console numbers), this game can have a good community. Sometimes people look at concurrent player counts and seem to conflate that with total logins for a day, but if you really think about it if there are at any point 4,000 people logged on that means 10s of thousands of players are logging on EVERY DAY. Now you will only see a subsection of those players depending on the time you play, but this is well within a sustainable community size.

Third I wanna say the idea that this re-release was some sort of "cash grab" is absolutely asinine in my opinion. It just seems so plainly obvious that what this really is, is a passion project that made compromises and a deal with a dev team/publisher so that it could see the light of day. I mean the fact that the game focuses so little on revenue is evident of this. At the end of the day what concerns me the most is that the game is not "cash grabby" enough. The devs have said they plan to release "Ranked mode and skins via free updates" and have promised no "microtransactions", but I just don't see the benefit of skins being free and having no microtransactions at all. I think everyone can see that eventually paying for servers and people to make free skins will lead to the game going negative again. I also understand that the companies releasing the game are extremely hesitant to commit more resources in the fear of bleeding any profits they did make on release even quicker.

So what to do? Now this is just my personal opinion on what the dev/publishing team should to do to elongate the survivability of the game, but first off, I'd delete any mention of "free updates". Not only does this not drive anyone to buy the game, but I think it actively discourages players who are smart enough to realize that this isnt a sustainable business model. Even if the game was updated frequently and it was all truly free, I think making a big announcement like "Free Update 2.0 Release!" would drive more players than a pre-promise before any updates were released. Next I would say "Free Weekends" are gonna be make or break for this business model and because of that I think there should be a pretty big focus on restructuring progression. I know there will be a lot of ol' heads in the comments saying "back in my day we played for fun" and I do tend to agree, but unlocking all the heroes on the first day of playing feels weird and if I picked up the game on a free weekend my first feeling would be that no one put any thought into any of that. It'd honestly be a lot better to just scrap the hero unlock system altogether or to simply use the coins instead of these weird tickets you get. The basic idea going forward would be to focus mostly on improving the initial player experience with things like decent matchmaking, decent progression, decent tutorials, etc... Then over the next year having periodic free weekends in conjunction with price discounts to temporarily boost player counts and sales.

TL,DR: People obsessing about the player count are overreacting to a stat that really isnt that bad, but really it's the game's monetization/road map that are cause for the biggest concerns.

PS: Lastly I'll just say this. To anyone like myself who has been juicin some games every day and having fun, just keep doing you. Nothing lasts forever and even though there's mostly complaints on this subreddit (I guess my post included), my experience on the PC lately has been top tier. I queue solely for Clash, get a queue pop in under 30 seconds and get in a game. Every now and then theres a leaver, but I havent seen nearly as many as people report seeing on here. I aint sayin that the game is perfect (the bugs have been killin all of us), but as long as the queues are poppin and you're havin fun thats all that matters.