You’d be forgiven if you’ve already forgotten about Aliens Fireteam Elite, so let’s recap: It’s an Aliens franchise title by former Cryptic devs at Cold Iron Studios that started out as an MMOFPSÂ but was downgraded into a squad-centric co-op third-person shooter as the studio was bought and sold repeatedly until it was acquired by Daybreak, a sale that apparently didn’t end up going through, though EG7, Daybreak, and Cold Iron never acknowledged it, but that’s a separate issue from our topic today.
Anyhow, Kotaku noticed that Aliens has been plunging in popularity on Steam. It saw a peak player count just under 16,000 people when it launched in August, and that’s fallen to a peak count of 3,849 in the last month. Kotaku’s piece cites 792 players online when that piece was written, but again, Steamcharts shows an average of 1200 players in the last month, down from 10,000. Those percentage drops aren’t entirely unusual for an online title, particularly a title still charging 40 bucks for entry. But they’re still not ideal, nor do they bode all that well for future content, which is a shame since the game has some decent Steam reviews. In fact, the negative reviews largely center on the lack of players, quickplay issues, and necessity of playing with AI.
For all that, we’ve actually given the game a playthrough courtesy of MOP’s own Stream Team, and it’s not even half bad. But as we all know, quality isn’t necessarily a factor in popularity, and as Kotaku notes, those players the game did have seem to have bailed for Back 4 Blood.
