Why do 'new' games have so few owners?

[LeeWatsonAstro]

So according to PSNProfiles the new CoD has under 20k game owners. I realise that this site only tracks some profiles and not all, but the site tracks over 4 millions accounts. Out of 4 million accounts tracked fewer than 20 thousand own one of the biggest games of the year? If just doesn't seem correct. Fewer than 1 in 200 profiles own the game?

 

Either the number of game owners shown is radically lower than it is in reality or PSNProfiles tracks a couple of hundred thousand profiles at most. I've observed this with loads of games. I'm just using CoD 2019 as an example.

 

I'd love for someone to be able to explain this to me.

[Neputyunu]

Well, not everyone is playing CoD, obviously.

Some profiles only get updated once a week. So maybe PSNP does not know yet that these people started to play this game.

Also, not all of these four million accounts are unique. There are people with several accounts. I, for example, have a Canadian account, for the PSN store.

[AvengedEvil]

Because unregistered users won't be updated anymore since a while. Here's a thread about this topic.

 

 

[thefourfoldroot]

Because the site doesn't seem to update even registered users unless they sign in often.

[NightRusticDawn]

It's a conspiracy, we all are next.

 

[dannyswfc9]

If you look at the previous cods the owners and recent players have gone up in the last month because they realise they arnt so bad compared to the new one

[Milktastrophe]

New games have fewer owners these days because people have started to realize that buying games for full price is a waste of money when they can just wait a few weeks/months for a sale.

[DesmaBR]

It sure ain't 4 million active accounts

[Sundr0wn_]

The game industry is getting worse and worse. I figure there's just more and more people who feel bored or just plain burnt out by Triple-A games and gaming altogether. 

I'm feeling the same way, i'm playing a lot less than i used too and most new releases just dont interest me anymore cause they look boring or unnecessarely grindy to sell aditional monetization. Or it's just the same old formula over again, that once was fun, but now has been overdone to complete oblivion (CoD, AC, pretty much any Ubisoft game). Nothing new and creative, it's stuff that has been done in 30 other games before it, like how everyone had to be a battle royal last year. There's been less new games this year i want to play than i have fingers.

[closertim]

13 hours ago, Milktastrophe said:

New games have fewer owners these days because people have started to realize that buying games for full price is a waste of money when they can just wait a few weeks/months for a sale.

Although when call of duty goes on sale it's not really on sale if you know what I mean

[mako-heart]

the site doesnt update, so all the stats are inaccurate lolz

[Cleggworth]

It's got nothing to do with the state of the industry, the website doesn't track anywhere close to 4million profiles anymore

 

BlackOps owners are drawn from the "Gamers tracked" pool of players ie 4 million+ people. The new Modern Warfare figures are drawn from, well I don't know, at the very most it's gonna be the members~300k. Likely to be even less but the numbers for premium members aren't published

 

Auto updating is off or at most partially on meaning the numbers are down across the board. These threads are starting to appear more and more often which is a clear sign to me something needs to be done

 

Now, I understand the argument for a trophy tracking site only using players who care enough about trophies enough to update their own profiles but when 90% of games use one system and the rest use another the stats are all wrong. It's either update all 4million profiles or remove all profiles that haven't been updated in.... ? I've no idea what the cut off should be

[AvengedEvil]

8 minutes ago, Cleggworth said:

Now, I understand the argument for a trophy tracking site only using players who care enough about trophies enough to update their own profiles but when 90% of games use one system and the rest use another the stats are all wrong. It's either update all 4million profiles or remove all profiles that haven't been updated in.... ? I've no idea what the cut off should be

 

Removing all inactive users would be the worst idea from marketing point of view. Turning back on auto-updates would be the right thing imho. If they can't handle all updates at once, they should do it in batches then.

[mako-heart]

2 minutes ago, AvengedEvil said:

 

Removing all inactive users would be the worst idea from marketing point of view. Turning back on auto-updates would be the right thing imho. If they can't handle all updates at once, they should do it in batches then.

 

I think the  xbox site uses batches, its no big deal imo

[Sikutai]

I don't get it too. I mean, 10 Millions of Players play the new CoD but on this site are just some thousands.

[Cleggworth]

6 minutes ago, AvengedEvil said:

 

Removing all inactive users would be the worst idea from marketing point of view. Turning back on auto-updates would be the right thing imho. If they can't handle all updates at once, they should do it in batches then.

 

I agree, 4 million gamers tracked is probably the most important number here for most parties. Just a shame it's not really true these days

 

If the stats were correct maybe there could be an accurate debate on the current state on the industry. Death Stranding is the first game in forever that had topped 10k players on the home page so it must have sold great but it's nowhere near the 30-40k players a top tier game like that used to hit so it mustn't have done well right? It makes a hell of a difference

[AvengedEvil]

33 minutes ago, mako-heart said:

 

I think the  xbox site uses batches, its no big deal imo

 

I think PSNP would get a lot of errors the first time due to profiles which changed their names. But this should be a one-time issue and not a big deal afterwards.

[Azaan60]

 

15 hours ago, Milktastrophe said:

New games have fewer owners these days because people have started to realize that buying games for full price is a waste of money when they can just wait a few weeks/months for a sale.

 

2 hours ago, Sundr0wn_ said:

The game industry is getting worse and worse. I figure there's just more and more people who feel bored or just plain burnt out by Triple-A games and gaming altogether. 

 

Lmao at some of these answers. 

 

The reason the number of game owners for new games is so small is because Sly turned off auto updating for unregistered members. 

 

There are a shit ton of users who haven't had their stats updated for over a year. 

 

Previous COD games have had their stats taken from 4 million people while newer ones are only being tracked for registered users. Probably in the 300k-400k range. This brings the numbers way down. 

 

 

Edited November 18, 2019 by Azaan60

[Folkenio]

Not all PSN users are registered in this site. It's been said before, and always seems to be ignored.

 

EDIT: For some info about numbers, PSNP has about 4 million registered users. After some digging, PSN has, as of March 2019, 94 million active users. Which makes this site be around the 4.420734042553192 % of users.
 

More data about it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_Network

https://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2013/07/03/psn-passes-110-million-accounts-sony-pictures-developing-exclusive-original-tv-style-programming-for-psn-timed-exclusives/

https://www.statista.com/statistics/272639/number-of-registered-accounts-of-playstation-network/

Edited November 18, 2019 by Folkenio

[FawltyPowers]

PSNP used to track all 94 million active accounts, but around 90 million of them were caught cheating and had their profiles removed.

[pinkrobot_pb]

27 minutes ago, FawltyPowers said:

PSNP used to track all 94 million active accounts, but around 90 million of them were caught cheating and had their profiles removed.

Damn CFW users everywhere.

 

In other news: farty towels.

Edited November 18, 2019 by pinkrobot_pb

[You]

It's got nothing to do with the state of the industry, sure there are lots of users not on PSN. There's other factors, but just this year alone there's just so many games coming out, seems like a AAA game coming out every single week. And everyone single game is often a 100+ hour grindfest with DLC coming out for each every month or two. I feel that people are too busy playing other games, some they probably just bought weeks or months earlier and are still playing. Going for platinums makes this even worse, means you have to play games for even longer before moving onto the next.

 

I mean look at the front of the site, there's like 10 popular games this week, Shenmue III is out tomorrow and Death Stranding released similar time to COD. Old games like Assassin Creed has DLC 7, that's back on the list. Who has the time or money to buy all these games on Day 1? Star Wars, even Borderlands 3 stil seems new to me. And look at Nioh, that's back in the list due to being free on PS+

 

There's just too many games coming out, add on the top of that, awesome HD masters for almost every hit game of yesteryear. I'm still playing games from 2014 on my Vita.

 

Too many games, so little time.

 

And it's only getting worse.

 

PS I can't believe PS5 is coming soon. I need a time machine or at least a device to slow down time so I can have 5 years compressed into one day to catch up on all my PS4 and Vita stuff. Even then, 5 years just playing games everyday, still don't feel like that's enough time to go through my back log and complete most games, if only just once. My PS3 stuff, well I've practically given up on all that.

Edited November 18, 2019 by enaysoft

[Otonio_Bruno]

Since some 'complained' that unregistered users aren't getting updates, let me share some knowledge on the matter: Most of those 4 million accounts tracked here were from back when PSN not only allowed to pull data from any profile entered in the search bar but also any all friend's profile from that profile. But then PSN changed it's privacy policy and demanded that no friend's info would be pulled from PSN/Sony servers without consentment, and Sly had to oblige to that.

 

It has been many years since that happened. It doesn't make much sense to keep updating such old accounts since it both requires a lot of data traffic to go through, but also might block any access PSNP has to PSN servers (AFAIK PSN block requests if they are a huge amount in a short time). There is also the fact that pulling trophy data from PSN isn't always easy as some people might believe, Sly has commented many times how he has to adapt to how he pull data from there since Sony keeping changing PSN infraestructure.

 

On top of that, there is the PSN ID change which does a big number of tricks when tracking the old and new profiles and that still give some problems around.

 

So, unregistered users should remain unupdated really unless something new comes on that allows to pull data from PSN without any worry and at very low 'cost'. Registered members though do need to get auto-updated, even if only once a week (Profiles that hadn't logged in years) and Sly should do something about it if auto-update isn't working properly for those.

[Rukiafan7]

On 11/17/2019 at 11:12 AM, Milktastrophe said:

New games have fewer owners these days because people have started to realize that buying games for full price is a waste of money when they can just wait a few weeks/months for a sale.

 

I'll buy full-priced games from time-to-time, but only physical copies. I tend to buy digital for older games though as the sales for older games are MUCH better on PSN.

 

 

[RedDevil757]

Because people are fed up of being unpaid beta testers probably.