Despite the player count numbers that are available on Steam charts, there’s a second-level metric that I think is useful to track the health of an MMO, and that’s the engagement of the subreddit(s) devoted to the game. For a long time, I’ve noticed a signifiant drop-off in the activity on /r/elderscrollsonline, but subredditstats.com has been down for a long time now. I just found Arctic Shift, though I have no idea why it’s named this. Anyway, it’s the tool I’ve been missing in order to quantify what I’ve been feeling qualitatively.
In these graphs, you can see both games take a jump at COVID. You can see the Wall event and the Season 0 in the ESO graph, and you can see the first and second Prime TV seasons’ bumps in the 76 graph. While player counts are almost the same between ESO and 76, the engagement on their subreddits tells a different story. 76’s engagement is around twice that of ESO’s.
I think this bodes very badly for ESO.
That being said, Twitch Stats fare a little better for ESO.
There are about 25% more channels for ESO than 76, and overall viewers is about twice as high. On the one hand, that undermines my thesis that ESO is doomed, given that I think 76 is in no danger, and all these numbers are in the same ballpark. However, there’s not a lot of value in watching 76. Things are too quick and too random. I don’t like watching people play games; I’d much rather just play them myself. However, I can totally see watching someone play through a trial in ESO, and that takes an hour. Two, perhaps, if they’re not pros, and they’re doing vet. I mean, maybe you’d watch someone do the raid in 76, but if the group knows what they’re doing, that’s 10 minutes.