2024 Games That Lost Their Playerbase In Months
Every year, developers face the serious challenge of keeping players, well... playing. 2024 has been no different, with games that might be able to make a comeback and those that were almost guaranteed to lose their first wave of fans.
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00:00Every year, developers face the serious challenge of keeping players, well, playing. 2024 has been
00:07no different, with games that might be able to make a comeback, and those that were almost
00:11guaranteed to lose their first wave of fans. First off, Helldivers 2 is still one of the
00:17biggest surprises of the year. Developer Arrowhead Game Studios likely thought that
00:21it would just be building on the niche success of its original 2015 game, but the sequel instead
00:26debuted as one of the most popular games of 2024. With excellent third-person combat and a truly
00:32unique approach to immersive and cooperative storytelling, Arrowhead's latest game quickly
00:37gained a massive player base. It just didn't manage to hold on to all of those players for
00:41very long. Helldivers 2 is still an incredible game, but it makes sense that 90% of the game's
00:47players have vanished. As a general rule, live-service games struggle to keep their numbers
00:51up on a consistent basis. The game's publisher, Sony, didn't help matters when it tried to force
00:56PC players to link their Steam accounts to the PlayStation Network. The game managed to pull
01:01through that catastrophe just in time for its stream of new content to turn into a trickle.
01:06Arrowhead taking more time with its updates is great news for the game's most loyal fans,
01:10but without a constant bombardment of content, most of its players — the ones who weren't already
01:14boycotting it after the PSN debacle, that is — started seeking out other games.
01:19In this time of need, Super Earth once again calls upon her mightiest,
01:24bravest, most obedient heroes.
01:27Palworld is another 2024 game that seemingly came out of nowhere and took the entire industry by
01:32storm. Pocket Pair's multiplayer survival game took more than a few cues from Pokemon,
01:37and that turned out to be a winning strategy. At its peak, Palworld had more than two million
01:42concurrent players, making it one of the most popular games in Steam's history. No game could
01:47keep up those kinds of numbers, and Palworld ended up experiencing a 97% drop in players a
01:52few months after its early access debut. With that said, Palworld still has a sizable amount of core
01:58fans, and the game has seen its concurrent player count jump into the mid-six figure range whenever
02:03new content rolls out. One of the game's devs fired back at the player base debate in early
02:07July, arguing that gamers should focus their attention on simply playing games they enjoy.
02:12That kind of fun-first approach is a big reason why Palworld didn't immediately drop off the
02:17map after its first few weeks as the game of the moment. It's likely that Palworld will
02:21continue to entertain its hardcore fanbase for a long time, but that initial drop-off
02:25briefly had some gamers predicting an untimely end for their adventures on the Palpagose Islands.
02:32The same week that Arrowhead launched Helldivers 2, Square Enix dropped a different PlayStation
02:41exclusive that started doing numbers. Foamstars actually outperformed Helldivers 2 that week,
02:46but the success wasn't meant to last. The game also started bleeding players way faster than
02:51Arrowhead's surprise hit, losing more than half of its players in just two weeks.
02:55Within a couple of months, over 90 percent of the Foamstars player base had evaporated.
03:00If Foamstars hadn't been up against 2024 giants like Helldivers 2 and Palworld,
03:04it might have had more of a fighting chance. The game received middling reviews and unfavorable
03:09comparisons to Nintendo's beloved Splatoon franchise, but it definitely had promising
03:14elements. Unfortunately, it wasn't nearly as polished as Arrowhead's PlayStation exclusive.
03:20Foamstars is still kicking around, but the game's fate almost entirely rests on how many resources
03:25Square Enix is willing to dedicate to improving the experience for active players.
03:29We were worried about Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League well before the game actually
03:34launched. The game suffered from some delays, and despite being a full-priced title,
03:38it looked like it was going to come with all the hallmarks of the worst type of live service game
03:42An expensive battle pass, generic missions and looter-shooter gameplay,
03:46and hefty grinding requirements didn't get many people hyped for the game,
03:50and the fact that many reviewers didn't receive advanced copies made Suicide Squad
03:54seem even more concerning. Leaked cutscenes and major spoilers generated even more controversy
04:00for the game, which felt like a bizarre shift from the highs of Rocksteady's Batman Arkham
04:04franchise. The game debuted to fairly poor reviews, and it started losing players almost immediately.
04:10God help us.
04:12Suicide Squad launched at the end of January, and by April, it registered an active player
04:16count in the hundreds. For a while, the game even had fewer players than 2020's ill-fated
04:21Marvel's Avengers. Like the other games on this list, Suicide Squad has continued
04:26crawling forward, with Warner Bros. continuing to produce content.