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why is the player base decreasing?
Taking Steam data, the player base continues to decline. I know Steam doesn't count consoles and I'm not saying dbd is dying. But why?
The game is much more balanced now than 2-3 years ago, killers are very solid and viable (except for a few), there are many balanced maps (except for a few), many "broken" strategies no longer exist...
In theory the player base should increase and not decrease.
Some people will now say "there are no new game modes"... "lights out" had literally no effect on player numbers.
your opinions?
Comments
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soloq players slowly quitting the game
65 -
Because SoloQ is garbage
60 -
People being burnt out could be one of the major reasons, also with the "lights out" apparently killers would just tunnel (This is what I've heard, I haven't played it yet).
Another thing is that "lights out" probably didn't peak much peoples interest, but it could be people are just waiting for the new chapter since those bring more attention. So the player count will probably go up next chapter release, since this is how most multiplayer games work.
Or it could be Solo Q players leaving, the experience not being the best right now.
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I'd assume a handful of reasons but if I had to bet, the largest group of people leaving or taking a break are from solo que.
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While DBD may not have as many players as it did at its peak, it's not really dying. The last 30 days on steamcharts show an increase (likely due to people checking out the event).
DBD has its up and downs over the year, people come check out new content and play other games afterwards.
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Probably because there isn't really anything new to look forward to in DBD at the moment. New killers? Interesting, but nothing special. New maps? Pretty, yet done plenty. Balance adjustments? Cool, but it's still the usual. Lights Out? Also pretty cool, groundbreaking for DBD's standards too, but yet it's just DBD but with cut content and darker environments, which doesn't seem to interest everybody.
I think in order for DBD to peak again they need to create something groundbreaking, like an all-new unique gamemode such as 2v8 or Prop Hunt. Lights Out was a cute prototype but it wasn't super crazy and not everybody seems to enjoy it either.
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SoloQ is too painful for veterans and new players alike.
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"and I'm not saying dbd is dying." - OP
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I can only speak to my own playtime lately, but I'm just kind of bored. Killer isn't very challenging, and solo survivor usually feels like a complete waste of time.
Outcomes often feel contrived and inorganic on both sides. I'm able to sleepwalk through 90% of my killer games and feel like I won them the second it put me in that lobby.
And conversely, so many solo survivor games feel like they were lost the second the lobby was put together. It's not fun or interesting to avoid hits from an Oni for 2 gens along with 2 teammates, and then have a 4th teammate get caught crouching behind a random rock for no reason and proceed to be tunneled out because they're ridiculously less skilled than the rest of the lobby. That means absolutely nothing I did in that match matters. How is that ok?
I think players view and approach the game differently in 2024 than they did in 2016, but the developers get too caught up in the 2016 vision of both roles at times.
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Balanced doesn't always equate to fun. The game might be the most balanced it's been in a long time (possibly ever), but it seems that most people agree that it's not in a very enjoyable state, especially for solo queue players.
Map design is the biggest issue in the game IMO, simply due to either the plethora of resources or the exact opposite. Some maps literally spawn with like 9 pallets and half of them are super unsafe, some spawn with 20 and over half of them are super safe. It puts you in a position as a player where you almost know the result of the game before it even starts, sometimes you just have to accept that you lost from the get-go and that's a terrible feeling as a player.
Add on top of this that a lot of killer releases have been following the trend of heavy anti-loop tactics, often putting survivors in positions of "damned if you do, damned if you don't". Losing a sense of agency that a player has over the game and allows for very little skill expression as a survivor.
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For me personally I'm mostly waiting for the ptb which I'm actually really excited for.
As for what we have now, meta is just kinda stale? As survivor you really only have 10 good perks to choose from and anything else is a meme and then beyond that people are mostly playing the same 4-5 killers that more or less all do the same thing of "go fast" which isn't that fun to go against. Then on top of that those killers are all running the same 6-7 perks most of which is gen regression or stall.
I guess to put it in simple terms the meta has settled and it's very narrow and that gets repetitive very quickly.
BHVR needs to be changing a lot more perks during each update IMO. I was always a bit meh at the way it felt like Blizzard made balanced changes not based on what was strong but rather just to shake up the meta cuz they could but now seeing BHVR do the opposite of that and only change things if they're broken I think I much prefer the shaking things up cuz you can philosophy of balancing. Game isn't bad or anything just boring.
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Solo-q is garbage and killer is easy. So there is no fun in DbD right now, at least for me. I won't surprise if many solo players feels same and leaving game.
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Sure the game may be the most balanced but still killers seem to struggle. Survivors have seen the deletion of BNP, medkits, MFT, PT and either FTP or BU in the future while killers haven gotten better gen defense back and yet gameplay still leads to the same least riveting experience.
Not many people are having fun.
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Like others have said, solo queue is pretty miserable. I play killer too and I'm tired of getting matched against people who play this game like 18 hours a day. I'm a casual player and not interested in going against multiple-thousand-hour player who know how to abuse every busted loop in the game. Matchmaking is non-functional, so losing matches doesn't seem to change anything. The game is consistently fun only if you play in a 3-4 man SWF on comms.
I think the other big issue is stale gameplay. The devs have made some changes over the years, but it takes way too long to fix bugs or to incorporate any new elements to the game. Some killer add-ons have been updated, but on the survivor side there has been pretty much nothing new for items/add-ons in years. As for the core game mechanics, there has only been one major change in 8 years - the end-game collapse.
To sum it up - terrible game balance that favors one specific group of players + lack of any meaningful changes to core gameplay.
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While the game has become more balanced, the chaos is what made it fun for a lot of people. Goofy techs and things that promoted creativity were being removed 1 by 1 which lowers the skill ceiling of certain characters, and it makes it so veteran players have fewer options to pick up something new to learn, which also decreases the fun factor.
If they embraced the goofy side of the community, the game would be taken a lot less seriously by a lot of people.
Post edited by Shroompy on7 -
Also wanted to add that I think a huge reason for having such predictable matches is that their philosophy on benchmarking a 60% win rate for killers absolutely destroys any semblance of matchmaking or real balance changes. You can literally tell if you "won" 2-3 games in a row, that you're simply going to lose your next game due to the game deciding you need to lose to "even out" your win-rate.
This games matchmaking feels extremely inorganic and forced and that makes for a terrible experience as you can literally tell if you're going to win or not from the lobby, and 90% of the time, you're right.
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Personally i think there are many reasons. These are the most significant ones.
A) The game is 7-8 years old. Not many games can actually survive that long. Most games will become stale after such a long run.
B) DBD is running out of absolutly top licences. While Chucky and Alien were very good licenses, they could not create a hype like others did. Remember back when Stranger Things came to the game? Or Myers? Or Pyramid Head. Everybody was super excited. Maybe the marketing was not as good as it was, i can not tell.
C) The game is more ballanced in the SWF vs Killer department. The issue is, BHVR decided to make killer strong enough to compete with SWF to make killer more happy. But with that, they made survivors overall, especially solo players more unhappy.
2 -
SoloQ is, on average if you're unlucky with teammates, a frustrating experience. Especially with tunnelling being at an all-time high and the latest patch making it worse.
The latest patch (7.5.0) seriously hurt weaker/M1 Killers without changing anything for S-tier Killers, reducing Killer variety and perk variety (variety is one of the things that sets DBD apart from other assyms).
Lights Out didn't take off as much as we hoped. A new game mode was asked for years and it wasn't very popular in the end. Hopefully future modifiers will have more success. It is a step in the right direction though and could be nice to keep in custom games.
Alan Wake, despite being a license, was a Survivor-only chapter. Which means in terms of gameplay it doesn't bring a lot on it's own except for perks.
The next chapter is coming soon and lots of people are mostly just coming back for new chapters and are otherwise not playing regularily.
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Solo Q survivor sucks, it's in a really bad state
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The game is much more balanced now than 2-3 years ago..,While I agree with this statement, I have to say that 2018 was dbd at it's peak (imo). Yes there was a lot of busted stuff such as, release MoM, instant DS skill check on the obsession without being hooked, OG Nurse and Spirit, OG Ruin, Killer's weren't tunneling and camping as hard as they are now, killers able to grab survivor's from the hatch.
DBD in 2024 it's not necessarily the balance, but the experience for either side isn't engaging or fun.
Survivor: Despite that I find survivor completely boring to play weather I'm solo or swf, there's nothing unique about the role or characters. It's just hold M1 with occasional skill checks, Ring O Pallet, and trying not to get camped/tunnelled out
Killer: How quickly gens can get done and regression/slowdown not being enough makes you feel like you have to play scummy and tunnel someone out as quickly as possible so that you can at least enjoy the match.
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Honestly I think the answer is an ugly truth. I think people are leaving because their favorite broken mechanic cannot be exploited anymore. It is unfortunately a part of human nature to dominate your enemy (carte blanche when you have the anonymity of the internet) and a lot of the broken mechanics in the game allowed you to do precisely that.
I personally think that DBD was (and still sometimes is) a personal cruelty simulator for some people to express their more base instincts. Cheap and broken mechanics are heavily abused by players regardless of what side you are playing on. Now that these are being fixed I think people who enjoyed this aspect moved on to different places that have easier ways to dominate opponents.
It’s always about control. Cheap exploitable mechanics give control. Fixing cheap exploitable mechanics takes away control. So people go to where they have more control. And what do you know there are people who love to have control over other people.
I think this is one of the many reasons why some people may be leaving DBD.
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The numbers been hovering around 30k pretty consistently.
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Over multiple years, DBD at least (!) has 30k players on steam.
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The game has been consistently in the top 25-50 games on Steam, which is not bad for a very niche and janky game that is over 7 years old. At this point I assume the majority of people who would be interested in the game has already played it. Also the ones who left probably wouldn't be brought back by minor balance changes, it'd take a huge overhaul in terms of gameplay, graphics, UI, etc.
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While I can see this point and agree that some people are definitely like this, I think a bigger reason for people leaving is feeling that they have no control over the outcome of matches, especially in solo queue. I don't think this is a domination thing or anything, I simply think it's players feeling a lack of skill expression. I think a lot of people are led to the feeling of "what's the point", because you can literally play the perfect match and have absolutely no autonomy for how the match plays out. Bad teammates, someone getting tunneled out right away, etc. It sucks to feel like you have zero control over how the match plays out and I think that's a major turnoff for a lot of people.
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Part of it is because playing Killer is horrid:
- You do badly? Insults and ridicule.
- You do well? Insults, threats, and ridicule.
- You 4K? Insults, threats, and ridicule. Get accused of breaking some insipid 'rule' Survivors made up. (Seriously, I got accused of 'proxy camping' and 'tunneling' because I walked away from the hook, only to have the person rescued 5 seconds later. Having seen no one else; I returned to the hook. Where the unhooked proceeded to bodyblock me, then accuse me of 'tunneling' because I downed them and re-hooked them.) Also get told whatever Killer, perks, or map were used is 'crutch' and 'for noobs', and how you only won because of the hated Killer/perks/map.
- You don't give hatch? Expect to be called a 'sweat' and how 'you don't need to try for the 4K'. (Though I've never seen a Survivor give me a kill if they are about to 4E. Apparently only Killers can try too hard. 🙄).
It makes playing Killer a thankless job more than a fun game. Sometimes, I feel like the Survivors I play against see Killers as NPCs that exist for their fun instead of a human being trying to have fun & win, same as them.
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Sure, absolutely. The people and feelings you’re talking about are also another reason. 100% agree.
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When DBD survived the absolute dive in numbers from year 5 I’ve become convinced the game can’t die.
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It's definitely a mix of a bunch of things. People quit games for a myriad of reasons, it's super hard to pinpoint a single thing for why people want to stop playing, as it can often be a mix of a bunch of different reasons and feelings.
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Ive gone basically a month without this happening, and if it has then I dont remember it because Im not gonna get personally offended by a kid going "gg ez" or say some other generic insult in an chat that I know I can disable if it makes me that upset.
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I would recommend turning either your messages off, or disabling the end game chat. Play how you want to play and find your own enjoyment with that.
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I understand that. I get the argument that you can’t change other people so just have thick skin and ignore it. I mean what else can we do. But politeness and respect really do go a very very long way when it comes to maintaining the health of a community.
It’s easy to say feelings don’t matter, only controlling your own. And there’s truth to that. But feelings do kind of matter and it may seem like a thankless job to be considerate of feelings but it is something we can be better at (obviously within reason). Trash talk will always exist. The quantity and intensity of negativity seems like it will always exist. But I truly believe that wholesomeness, consideration and respect are the necessary counter balances to that negativity.
We take and leave the things that we want.
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I very rarely get these as well (funnily, I get more playing survivor than killer) but I've been going with the "kill them with kindness" route and it's pretty funny to either see people completely 180 and try to say something nice, or just get more frustrated that they didn't get the salty response they wanted.
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the game is killer sided to the point where playing survivor is a miserable slog.
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I think that’s the best way of doing it.
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I can't remember the last time I had any of those happen.
I notice players seem to latch on negativity from survivors like it's a huge problem but for as long as I've been playing so sort of interactions seem like outliers.
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The new released killers is why i quit the game.
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Because they keep trying to balance the game. And it's making it less a party game and more something that will become a husk of itself. No one wants to play with a husk. Factor in the terrible killer Meta and survivor issues, and you dont have much of a good thing left.
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It really is not.
https://steamcharts.com/app/381210
Nothing here suggesting anything declining wise. Same patterns for summer/holidays
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If you quit the game then why are you still here? Its like going to a baby shower just to tell everyone how much you hate kids
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I‘ve got to the point, where I only play killer. It is no good experience to play survivor. It feels chanceless and there are no good perks for survivors. I want to use iron will and hide in bushes in chases, but no, I still moan to load. I would much more appreciate a game, where I have good things and the enemy has good things, instead of having only useless things. At least I can pick abilities as killer, which I can‘t as survivor. Most reworks only favor killers especially the map reworks. Borgo shows that extremely. I had no problems with this map on both sides and I really liked it, now it’s my most hated map in the whole game.
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because i can? lol i never said i quit permanently. i can still chat and hope that they actually balance the game and weaken killers a little.
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That's not at all what they implied or said, and your analogy doesn't work either. It would be more like going to a baby shower after deciding not to have kids yourself, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.
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I'm currently not playing. My reason is the state of solo queue as well. The big issue for me is MMR/matchmaking. The killers I get are mostly 100% beatable, I just get teammates that are considerably worse than the killer. And the best thing about MMR is that nothing about that will ever change because "by construction" once you're losing solo it will just ensure you're losing even more.
I'm on console, so I'm not reflected in Steam numbers. I used to (rarely) SWF with some people who contacted me after matches back when crossplay off was still viable. I haven't seen them playing DbD or getting new trophies in a long time, so the decline is likely similar on console.
Even though the game is not dying right now, I don't really want it to die, and if the devs wait with countermeasures until the numbers show that it is very obviously dying that's probably too late. And making the game attractive enough to gain more players seems like a fairly good idea to me that everyone would benefit from, even if the player numbers right now are "fine".
(Well I'm currently debating whether I should play a bit again and speedrun through the event tome, but if I do I'll 100% do it as killer. Right now I don't feel like playing though, even as killer. My motivation to play as solo survivor is absolutely zero)
7 -
Sept 2021 - 51K average players
Jan 2024 - 28K average players
The game started bleeding players when they added MMR and was made worse when they started buffing killers across the board. Both of these changes made the game extremely unfun for casual players. What if the killer brings four slowdowns and tunnels? You don't have the tools you used to have to counter it. Your solo team just collapses and you lose at 3-4 gens. You can only play so many games like this before you just get sick of the game and quit. Matchmaking doesn't do you any favors since it doesn't keep these players in their own bracket. Once you reach low-middle MMR it feels like you just thrown in with everyone in the upper brackets. Me getting matched with killers who have 6000+ hours is not uncommon at all even though I probably lose more than I win in solo. I get all of the sweats but I don't get the bad players I used to get before MMR was added. I can't even remember the last time I saw a killer with a green perk. Due to this every game feels like a massive struggle.
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Sorry what are we talking about?
Numbers have been stable at 30'000 since November 2022, with a jump around the Twisted Masquerade in June 2023.
Not that I want to insult anyone... but a lot of stuff in this thread sounds a lot like misinformation to push some kind of agenda.
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Killers arent as strong as you make them out to be, the main issue is inconsistent matchmaking.
Having 4 good Survivors matched together is as rare as seeing Twins. When it does happen tho, it might as well be a completely different game.
You'll find more and more of these matches if you bring the proper mindset with you into a match. Playing selfishly and blaming your team every time (even if some times, it really is their fault) wont get you anywhere. Focus on what you could of done better.
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Yeah I misinterpreted it, mb
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A lot of really great and super popular games have come out recently like Palworld so my guess is people are just playing other games right now.
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One major piece of shade I want to also throw at this whole argument is DBDs highest numbers were between 2020 and 2022, the highest numbers mid 2021.
Does anyone remember anything that was going on in 2021? Any major worldwide events anyone can think of?
As much fun as I'm sure it is to spout huge doom and gloom theories, the entire gaming industry saw a massive boon across the whole world because of global lockdowns; every single gaming platform saw record numbers through those years.
This supposed 'dip' in the player base as a result of MMR in September 2021, or a 'design philosophy of prioritising balance over fun' are fabrications born out of a highly skewed and biased interpretation of the data.
The fact is this game still has 3 times the numbers it had through the first 2 years of it's life, and nearly double what it had up to 2020. 30'000 player average for a 5 year old game is actually quite phenomenal.
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