For me, even though I haven't been truly active with SG for a while, I still log on almost every day and it sucks to see what's happened with the servers and stuff. Obviously, the CS:S playerbase is dying, a re-evaluation needs to be done to keep SG stable. It's pretty much agreed though that moving to other games (alongside CS:S or not) is the way to go, which has also been shown by the higher ups. So, let's look at the statistics:
Here is the list of some of the most active games currently, according to Steam (included games with ~>10k player count):
The first thing to notice: CS:S is 16th on the list (the original CS is actually beating it now, which I didn't expect to happen). Among the top games, CS:GO is sitting at fifth, peaking at almost 3 times the amount of source. It's a good game, very well-made and can definitely allow for a mostly smooth game transition for traditional source players, at least in my opinion. The general game mechanics haven't changed a whole lot (ie. not enough to disrupt the learning curve for incoming source players as a whole), and the official game mode set has been expanded while custom modes are still supported (ie. minigames, zombies). So, this is the most likely avenue to explore for stable gains.
After that: let's start at the top of the list.
Dota2 - huge, HUGE playerbase (556k peak simultaneous players) that has untapped potential. Obviously as it's a "battle arena" game not unlike LoL and sc2, it's harder to coordinate an official spot in the community than something like CS. However, many SG members are familiar with the game mechanics, structure and rules, and I feel that looking into these types of games would benefit the community a lot. There is a great opportunity for growing the userbase through officially-streamed events and games via Twitch or other similar sites, since many of the top channels on twitch are streamers on LoL/dota/sc2. Unfortunately I'm not very well-versed in this gaming area, so I can't offer much more insight game-wise than this (ie. setup of games, tournaments, etc), but I think that the community can offer up many suggestions when exploring this avenue.
Civ V - I'm going to leave this blank for now, because I don't know enough about it at this point to assess its worthiness of exploration for SG.
TF2 - When it became F2P, I feel like the quality of it kind of went down (hats!) but it's still immensely popular and has quite a significant playerbase. It's pretty oversaturated already with servers, so if we were to consider launching into it (did we ever have servers on it? I don't remember), we'll have to think of unique ways to do so. We would want people to pay attention to our servers through some sort of unique selling proposition, while at the same time not being so non-mainstream or complex that it pushes people away. I'd put TF2 near the top for viable options (after CS:GO and maybe on the same level as Dota/LoL/sc2).
Games to Watch
I wanted to mention these games because they have a lot of potential once they're out of the alpha/beta testing phases and aren't full of bugs:
DayZ - The original DayZ was a mod for the popular game Arma 2. It saw widespread success and is still in development by the community. However, Bohemia Interactive and the original creators of the DayZ mod have been working on and released DayZ (the game) into alpha very recently. Everyone that I've talked to says it's very, very good but still full of bugs as it's only in the alpha stage. Once most things are ironed out and the game gets closer to a full release, we should absolutely look into entering the player market.
Rust - If you don't know, this is a survival-based multiplayer FPS being developed by Garry Newman (creator of GMod). Like DayZ, it has been gaining attention and very good reviews from people who have been playing it. It has been fully released on Steam, but they're still dealing with major errors, bugs and DDoS attacks (one happened a few days ago). Also, the Rust community is filled with a lot of... well dumb people to be honest. I'd personally keep an eye on it but not consider entering for at least a few months, until the major issues are sorted and the community is filtered out a bit haha.
I feel like this year is going to be an interesting one for many gaming communities, but also a difficult one. There is definitely a lot of room for growth, but from the looks of it many of the games we've historically played host to are seeing a drop in player numbers, and we'll have to account for it by entering more popular games. On the web side of things, I think getting a VB5 license is a great idea as it's been released for a while and looks very sleek and functional. I love that many people want to get on board with the idea of expansion, and of course it'll have to be done carefully and will need a lot of planning and deliberation so that SG can maximize its success. Well, that's my two cents anyways.
Oh, and Happy New Year.
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