“SteamDB will say we have 1 player yesterday- we have 10,000” Stats, according to Chet Faliszek, are “synthesized on bad data and always amazingly low”
Chet Faliszek, a Left 4 Dead writer and Valve veteran, has stated that he will never again release a game in Early Access. Faliszek explained in a LinkedIn post that he will avoid using this method in future games due to how Steam and third-party sites measure player counts. Faliszek claims that the numbers displayed do not accurately reflect the number of players in the game.
The figures for The Anacrusis, the co-op FPS from Stray Bombay – a studio he co-founded with Riot Games’ Kimberly Voll – are, according to the developer, way off. “SteamDB will say we have 1 player yesterday, we have 10,000,” he says. He acknowledges that crossplay will skew the numbers slightly, but that this is also due to how those figures are calculated for small games.
“That stat gets thrown out every time we do an update, any time anyone mentions us,” Faliszek explained. “There is some small number of people on Steam who just instantly want to post – Dead Game and then state a stat sheet from SteamDB not just on our game, but any game that is under the threshold for the real numbers to be counted… and instead a number is synthesized on bad data and always amazingly low.”
This, according to the developer, works against smaller releases, limiting their ability to grow their player base, which contradicts the purpose of Early Access. “It will be closed beta all the way,” Faliszek says of future games. Stray Bombay released 56 updates to The Anacrusis in Early Access almost two years ago, in January 2022, adding new weapons, maps, and modes, as well as quality-of-life and player-requested features to the sci-fi shooter. The full release date is set for December 5, 2023.