One week after the release of the Enemy Territory: Quake Wars demo, how well did it fair against the current online behemoths?

The game didn’t manage to have a huge online impact, apparently attracting only a small group of Battlefield 2142 and Wolfenstein:Enemy Territory players. There’s a certain impact felt on the Battlefield 2 online presence too, started earlier, with the beta. And as the above graphics show, compared to the Battlefield 2142 demo release, released exactly one year ago, the ET:QW demo release buildup has definitely been less than extraordinary (the Battlefield 2142 demo is represented on the graphic as the last, light orange line; the one with no legend, and with the huge spike at the start).

The above graphic is a bit more specific, showing the absolute number of players online, with no weekly average (the sudden drop for all games at the end of the graphic is expected and should not be taken into consideration). It looks like the game has already achieved its initial release apex, with no immediate increase in sight. Not even the release of the demo on Steam last friday (hinting a possible retail release on the service) was enough to have the game gain momentum.

In the end, the game is a bit deeper and more complex than the average game has been trained to expect, and I believe this is what’s causing the slow adoption rate in the first place. The popularity of the demo over the next month will probably shine some more light on how well the game will do, showing us whether it’ll manage to achieve a solid, devout fanbase like Wolfenstein:Enemy Territory did, or just flop like Quake 4 did.

All in all, it’s still too early to predict anything, but I’d file the results of this demo release under the less-than-extraordinary category.

This entry was posted Monday, September 17th, 2007 at 6:23 am and is filed under Analysis. Both comments and pings are currently closed.