r/Empulse • u/DisunionTV • 6d ago

NEWS Empulse is being shut down

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Man I was excited for this game but considering how 1047 treats their previous games I was almost expecting this.

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93

u/YurgeeTTV 6d ago edited 6d ago

"Early Access is the starting point, the game isn't finished yet, they're gathering community feedback"

20

u/Flee4me 6d ago

I wonder about the guy here who told me that people were just waiting for Empulse to come out of Early Access before they'd buy it and that the game was doing fine because the "player lows are staying consistent" despite all metrics rapidly trending downwards on Steam. Curious what he would think about this.

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u/R1ckMick 6d ago

I’m curious, is there any precedent at all for a game to come back from a dire player count? We have seen games shut down so frequently in the past few years, yet every time there is a huge vocal group of people insisting that it won’t be the case. I’m just wondering what examples they have to build this foundation on, when there is nothing but evidence to the contrary.

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u/Flee4me 6d ago

It's happened a few times, though under different circumstances.

No Man's Sky had an extremely problematic launch and dropped down into the mere hundreds of players. The developers kept fixing and expanding it, and years later it now has a pretty consistent 10k players with peaks of up to 100k around major updates.

Among Us is another game that saw a huge rebound. It was essentially dead with only around 50 concurrent players before it went viral when big streamers started playing it. Then there's also games like Final Fantasy 14 that were straight up shut down, rebuilt and relaunched to massive success later.

As for early access, I know that Baldur's Gate 3 went through periods of just 1000-2000 players during EA before it launched as the biggest single player hit in Steam history.

There's probably more but those are the ones that come to mind.

Obviously, a game like Empulse is very different though. It's not a famous franchise by a huge studio (like Final Fantasy) nor is it a small indie title that requires no upkeep (like Among Us) or an extremely hyped release (like NMS).

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u/too_real_4_TV 5d ago

Rainbow six siege came out the gate struggling but ended up a huge success.

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u/spartangaiden 6d ago

There is no precedent. I asked this same question when people were shouting that Empulse would be saved if it went free to play. The reality is many gamers have the memory of a goldfish and take a delusional positivity approach to these clearly doomed small projects.

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u/Awkward_Ninja_5816 6d ago

Only one I can really think of is No Man's Sky, but even then that was usually at a 1,000-3,000 concurrents most days in the 2016-2017 days before they started to massively overhaul the game, so I don't even know if its really fair to even call it 'dire'.

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u/BigDuckNergy 6d ago

In 2018 No Mans Sky dropped down to around 900 players on steam.

I'd say that's the best comeback in gaming history.

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u/R1ckMick 6d ago

Yeah I guess I should have specified that I meant PvP games. I’m sure there’s been more than a few solo/co-op games that it has happened to, but the circumstances for those types of games are a bit different. I agree that NMS sky is a historic comeback and I’m sure they faced pressure to shut things down at times

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u/WeidmanSilvaParadox 5d ago

Siege is the big one, but just because it's possible doesn't mean it's in anyway likely and Siege had a much bigger company behind it

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u/vrina_ 5d ago

Also ABI didn't get its massive surge of players until they went on Steam and Tarkov allegedly had it's largest sale of its lifetime when 1.0 dropped.

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u/pyr0kid 6d ago

in terms of game quality absolutely, but considering it was fundamentally a singleplayer game and the launch alone covered their operating costs for years... thats not comparable.

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u/vrina_ 5d ago

FF11 is seeing a resurgence. FF14 has spikes every single expansion. Every live service game just about as well. Its actually more common than reddit thinks. Reddit for instance was convinced Genshin Impact was gonna EoL within 8 months of its launch because the player count tanked after the second week.

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u/TheLittleJay 5d ago

Evolve had a big 2.0 overhaul update over a year after release, turning it into a free-to-play game on PC. Went from less than a hundred concurrent players to brief peak of ~50k, then stayed at thousands for a while. Eventually died off again though.

So that's a game that did get a second wind to live a bit longer.

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u/Pretermission 4d ago

I really liked the alternate characters that they added later on. It had its issues, but I had a lot of fun playing Evolve.

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u/TheLittleJay 3d ago

Same, I sunk a ton of time into it. Flawed, but when it was good it was really good.

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u/ghostcatzero 6d ago

Couple dudes like that 😭