My Journey with “Predecessor Player Count”
So, someone at a place I used to work had this bright idea, right? “Let’s show the player count for the predecessor games!” they said. You know, the older games in a series. Sounds pretty straightforward on a PowerPoint slide, doesn’t it? Like, oh, you just grab a number from somewhere and, poof, it’s on the screen. Lemme tell you, it was anything but simple. It turned into a whole drawn-out thing.
First off, we had to figure out where in the world you even get this data. We’re talking about games that might be ancient. For some really old titles, the companies that made them don’t even exist anymore. And even if they do, it’s not like they’re keeping super detailed, public records of how many people were playing “Pixel Adventure Quest” on a random Tuesday back in, say, 2003. We tried, believe me. We sent out emails that probably just vanished into thin air. We poked around digital archives that looked like they hadn’t been updated since dial-up was cool. We got nothing. Zilch. Zero.
Then, another bright spark in a meeting said, “What about community estimates? You know, like from old forums or something?” So, off we went, diving into dusty corners of the internet, reading through ancient forum posts, and scrolling through endless Reddit threads. People would just throw out numbers. You wouldn’t believe the wild guesses. One person would swear blind there were “tens of thousands playing daily!” and then for the exact same game, around the same time, someone else would be like, “Nah, maybe 50 people, if that, and most of them were probably in my gaming clan.” It was like trying to catch smoke with your bare hands. Totally, utterly unreliable.
We even had a go at looking for data from those third-party game tracking sites for some of the slightly more recent predecessors. And yeah, a few of those exist. But the numbers they showed were all over the shop. One site would show a massive peak in players, another would show a flat line for the same period. And how do you even begin to check if any of it is real? You just can’t. It’s just a bunch of numbers floating around out there in the digital ether, and you’ve got no idea which ones, if any, are legit.
And don’t even get me started on the legal side of things. Oh boy. Let’s say, just for argument’s sake, we actually found some numbers that seemed kind of plausible. Could we even use them? What if the original publisher, or whoever owned the rights now, suddenly popped up out of nowhere and said, “Hey, those aren’t our official figures! Take them down!” It was a potential minefield. We probably spent more time talking to the legal folks, trying to figure out the ifs and buts, than we did actually trying to build anything for this so-called feature. It was getting pretty ridiculous.
This whole mess actually reminds me of this one gig I had a few years back, totally unrelated to gaming. We were trying to make this ancient, creaky legacy system talk to our shiny, new platform. The only documentation we had for the old system? It was literally this old binder, pages yellowed, covered in coffee stains. Half the pages were missing, and the ones that were there were written in what looked like some kind of secret code by someone who’d clearly had way too much caffeine. We wasted weeks, I tell you, WEEKS, just trying to figure out how one single, basic function in that old system worked. The guy who originally built it had apparently retired to a tropical island and, quite understandably, wanted absolutely nothing to do with us or his old code. We ended up just building this really clunky, awkward workaround that seemed to break down every other month. This whole “predecessor player count” thing felt exactly like that – like we were trying to dig up ghosts from an old machine that really didn’t want to give them up.
In the end, the whole “predecessor player count” feature just kind of… faded away. It got quietly pushed to the back burner and then just never came back. Too much effort, not enough reliable data, and way too many potential headaches down the line. I think they just ended up putting some vague, fluffy marketing speak there instead. You know the type: “Played by legions of fans!” or “A beloved classic that captured hearts!” Stuff that sounds impressive but doesn’t actually mean anything concrete. And that, my friends, is often the story of how these “great ideas” from meetings actually pan out in the real world. A whole lot of fuss and bother, and not a lot to show for it in the end.
