Zainny said: ↑



The Steam Charts however tell a bit of a different story (



View attachment 22331 Yeah, the Steam Charts I would say are probably a lot stronger statistic to base any kind of inferences about growth/decline on vs PA stats usage. PA stats usage will reflect a very small subset of players that are very different from the general playerbase - primarily hardcore/competitive players.The Steam Charts however tell a bit of a different story ( http://steamcharts.com/app/233250#6m ): Click to expand...

PA Stats arguably reflects how many people play PA on a more than "vs AI" level. That means it reflects the players you can count as being part of the online community. That's a very important metric, isn't it? It's actually THE metric if you ask yourself how healthy the online community is.The big peak you are seeing in may was the Galactic War update, that brought in a ton of vs AI player, most likely a lot of which had kickstarted the game and were waiting for a "vs AI" gamemode. You can see that peak on pa stats as well as on the steam graphs, during that time pa stats recorded a TON of GW games as well.Those "vs AI" players however tend to not actually stay very long with a game, as "vs AI" games just very rarely are good enough to play for month after month, so many of them left obviously. So the peak in may looks big on steam, but it's just a bunch of "vs AI" players rushing into the game, playing probably a few dozen hours, try a multiplayer game or two, and then move on to whatever next game they play.PA Stats usage in turn makes comparing the active group of online players much easier, it removes all the pure single player-players noise. And that shows: The amount of players in that area is not going down, it's peaking on every important update and even keeps some players from every peak.