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I want my money back for battlebit remastered. It took about six hours to realize "wait, this game is half baked" last summer. Steam did not accept my refund request just one hour outside of their standard trial window (which they've always been extremely cool about before), i'm guessing because a bunch of people didn't like it all at once. I tried it again just a month or so ago, a bunch of stuff is still wonky, and the logarithmic decrease in players (even after a spike from winter sale) since its peak last june reflects this. Seems to me they put all their effort into skin and map "content" than actually fixing bugs or improving systems and mechanics.
This is the cycle most new FPS games have done the last few years. Nothing outside of CoD, Apex and Fortnite seem to stick. The Finals, Battlebit, Splitgate all had massive initial players, then drop off significantly once it’s no longer the newest, greatest thing and go back to the established games.
Skins and Maps are easy money to attempt to keep development going, as these games are often released before they’re ready and due to the financial situation of the developers.
What happened to splitgate? I thought it was pretty good, at least it was 100% ready for launch with interesting concepts. I dropped it because I realized I couldn't compete with the kids these days... getting older and my hands and fingers don't work as quickly as they used to, I frankly suck at aiming now. I'm disappointed to see its 300 player count now, I assumed it would do well with its concept and execution being so good simultaneously. What did I miss?
I’m not 100% sure exactly what happened, but my best guess is that it just got stale quickly. The twitch streamers and kids who hop from game to game played for a few weeks, then when they got bored it just started dropping off in popularity, eventually leading to the death spiral.
I know at least for myself I just didn’t enjoy the gameplay loop as much as I did Apex legends, so I just went back to what I was familiar with and sunk another couple thousand hours in.
What happened to splitgate?
It went the way of every other arena shooter, like Quake... The skill ceiling is so high that it hit a critical point where the number of more experienced / higher skilled players outweighed the new / lower skilled players. New players come in, get annihilated, they can't figure out how to improve because the skill gap is so big, then they leave. Very few new players make it past that hurdle, and the players who persist get better and better, and the skill gap gets wider and wider...
Believe it or not, most arena shooter players are pretty old (relative to videogame demographics at least lol). I'm in my mid twenties and I've NEVER met someone my age who plays them, except one in their late twenties. All of my friends and people I talk to on arena shooters are over 30, and I've even met a married couple who were in their 50s.
To be fair battlebit fucked the game up. People left because they started making the game like CoD which is opposite of what most people were looking for in the game. Battlebit drove people away. It wasn’t because it wasn’t new anymore.
That and lots and LOTS of cheaters. Blaming it all on ADHD folks is disingenuous.