New World, the last WoW killer to date peaked at 900k concurrent players iirc and now relies on 75k daily peak concurrent players. (Thankfully they are exclusively available on Steal which provides us accurate player data)
Valheim, small indie survival game released earlier in 2021 peaked at 500k and has a 40k daily peak concurrent players iirc.
I’ll go on a limb and claim that Valheim didn’t cost half of New World’s Dev costs (altho to be fair it generates less than half revenues as the box costs less & there’s no additional mtx in the game)
This, to me, shows that there’s still room in the market. If a small indie can have nearly half of both the peak and daily players than a giant AAA MMORPG funded by Amazon then what would happen if a big studio actually led the charge ?
I’m not claiming that it’ll be a guaranteed success or anything along those lines. But if I learned anything about "Gamers ™ ", it’s that games matter more than the studio’s reputation. Otherwise no one would’ve bought the last two EA star wars games after Battlefront 2 and Anthem, despite them receiving mostly great reviews iirc.
