Enough Is Enough!!! The Ongoing Saga!!! 3 Year Anniversary

The whales are the few that buy up every piece of DLC on day one. I'm actually pretty shocked how many there are with this game over the years.

 

I could see a bump when the Just Trains route drops. Could be a saving grace for the game. However even I was interested in many TSW3 and now TSW4 routes, but will not buy into a game in this condition. So I wait (probably forever).

 

I only bought TSW3 with the packaged routes. I didn't buy anything else for it. I'm still waiting for Niddertalbahn and Peak Forest to get a big discount.

 

Still crossing my fingers on MSTS2. However regarding how DTG handle the situation as a whole. IMO TSW4 is what TSW3 should have been.

 

An MSTS2 would be a welcome new addition to this space. It would probably run well too. But I doubt it would ever happen.

 

I mean we all said the same thing about flight sim… and guess what it came back. If MSTS2 came out, it would easily give DTG a run for their money and it would encourage DTG to step their game up. One of the issues with stuff like Train Sim World, is the lack of competitive content especially on consoles. DTG would step up their game if someone big enough made a train simulator. The reason why DTG is the powerhouse it is today, is that there’s a lack of competition. Simrail can’t match up, Trainz has fallen off, Derail Valley doesn’t stand a chance, Run8 is just a scam to me, TSC isn’t on console…. So also it’s like there’s nothing and you are essentially forced to buy TSW or not play Train Sims at all.

 

TSW4 is what TSW2 should have been, considering the improved Scenario Planner and Livery Designer were originally promised to come for TSW2.

Man, imagine if they did an MSTS2 and it would be just as big of a deal as the original MSTS was. Remember how the original MSTS released with US freight, NEC, a steam era UK and Austrian, and even two Japanese routes! Now that was variety straight out from the box.

 

The thing is if MS decided to jump back in and create a quality MSTS2 with modern graphics it wouldn't be about DTG stepping up their game. It would be "how do we keep the lights on now?" as the already small population would be even worse. You'd always have a few hangers on like XPlane and P3D does, but it's just a matter of time.

 

I don't honestly see MS doing another train sim, after all they had two attempts and both failed for different reasons. (Not saying it wouldn't be nice of course).

Not sure how Run 8 could be considered a "scam" - yes it is very expensive to assemble all the pieces, they never have a discounted sale but on the flipside nowhere else can you eventually get a route that runs 500 miles + across California and most of Arizona? (Plus a sizeable chunk now of Florida and Georgia). It has the emergent gameplay of serving industries and a despatcher that is reasonably dynamic. Sadly though it does suffer from looking rather dated and I must admit when I saw the screenshots of the latest Horseshoe Curve route, those billboard trees really didn't cut it. The last route I bought was Donner Pass which used something like three or four basic terrain textures and looked nothing like the Sierra Nevada.

 

I don’t know it just doesn’t feel worth the asking price to me, plus I don’t really have an interest in US freight and non NEC content

 

If they have already had over 800,000 scenarios and gameplay sessions in a week then so much for the silent majority being people who won't buy it.

Sounds like you are a silent minority to me.

 

We are silently waiting for you to beta-test this mess for us. And a mess it is with missing content, performance issues, stuck traffic, crashes, etc.

 

I mean, that does not really sound that much for a recently released entry across several platforms.

 

There's still quite a large number playing TSW3 just on the steam dB numbers. That's a sizeable number who haven't yet seen a good reason to buy in. Then there's other potential customers who don't show because they've gone with other games like derail valley etc. Its early days but numbers appear down relative to each prior release. That's not a good trajectory for something that's supposed to be getting better over time.

It's good that plenty have bought tsw4 because it keeps a pretty decent franchise alive, but there's plenty of issues that even dtg have acknowledged. That puts people off not just tsw4 but the franchise in general, especially if those issues are not fixed.

Hardly time to pop the champagne..

 

Especially if every crashed session is counted as a game session

 

I could just as easily say that of the 1+ million registered members at trueachievements, only 376 (less than 0.1%) have gotten the easiest achievement on XBox TSW4, so that in itself demonstrates how easy it is to manipulate figures to make things sound better or worse than they actually are.
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Besides, there's nothing say the 800k figure wasn't generated by 10,000 users performing 80 of those tasks each....and if that's the case then when you consider the amount of pre-launch hype that DTG tried to generate with TSW4, 10k unit sales across all platforms isn't exactly astounding, is it?

 

4 October 2023 Steamdb

 

Have been with TSC for well over 10 years and TSW ever since Sand Patch Grade. With a little over 35 hours in TSW4, have not run into any of the problems many have noted. Running on PC and Steam, all content moved over, profile was easily imported, using Ultra settings and enhanced timetables where available. Even the Trenton timetables run satisfactorily on my system, none of the hitching as some are reporting, 50 to 60 fps in the station to well over 100 elsewhere on the route. Been have a blast playing around with Free Roam especially in timetable mode.

So maybe there are many others that have had my same experiences and hence the numbers being reported. Not trying to slight or ignore the problems being reported in these forums, but suggesting they are not universal for everyone.

 

Ouch.

 

18 people playing Newark - New Rochelle

 

Yep, I've only had extremely minor bugs/issues. 99% of which are tiny visual things.
The only serious issue I had were passengers not spawning on a few routes, and that was fixed in yesterdays patch.

 

Continuing the fantasy a bit. I'd be intrigued by what game engine they would opt for. Would they write a new one? They have the resources.

Yes, the problems I'm having are all about lighting and sound, nothing new there.

I'm not having any serious game play issues, other than NPC behavior. Still can't find any on NYT, though I hear a patch is fast approaching on Penn Track 13 1/2.

 

Who knows if it's a majority or minority staying away. However 800,000 may seem like a large number, but what is the average number per player? Maybe 15? If that number is realistic then there's only about 55,000 players across all platforms. And generally the first weeks represent the peak usage for this game barring some anomalies down the road (I'm guessing there may be another peak when JT's route comes out). Not sure what is considered a success in this space, but the population seems lower than I ever took it for.

 

If we are guessing how many copies of TSW4 will sell then I made some guesses a while back for TSW3 based on DTG’s revenue and other bits of information floating about and came up with a figure of 150,000 as a broad conservative estimate of total number of base game sales in a year. If I was anywhere close and TSW4 sells more than TSW3 did then we will have a little more than that figure for TSW4, maybe a lot more. If you take it that PC players are around a quarter of players, not the conveniently diplomatic equal third share that it was once said to be (in an attempt to stop platform wars on the forum), then that kind of figure would indeed lead to the average concurrent number of players seen in the Steam charts so often shared to foretell TSW’s demise.

I had to make some assumptions and educated guesses to come up with the figure above, such as what percentage of DTG’s revenue comes from TSW, the average number of DLC that players buy that contributes to that total revenue amount, how much each sale actually provides DTG with after platform providers have taken their cut, and assume an average price paid (taking into account the number of bundles, discounts and sales that occur on all platforms). There are lots of variables that I had to estimate values for, so a huge margin of error is guaranteed, so I erred more towards a conservative number. For the correlation between average player numbers shown in Steam charts and my estimated total number of players on Steam, I took one average player’s daily play time to be around 45 minutes, which does line up with the numbers I came up with starting from DTG’s revenue figures.

It was only a thought exercise for myself when I did it but as we are throwing guesses around I thought I’d share mine. As there are no official figures to look up, it’s the best I have, and although a process was used from official information I could find and info I’ve picked up from what DTG do say themselves, it included a lot of guess work, so it may be be way off, but maybe less off than the tiny numbers of players that other people may have come to.

There’s no evidence that TSW4 will do worse than other TSW titles, once the boost that the pandemic gave to TSW2 is adjusted for. So far it seems to me to be business as usual.

 

Well thought out approach. The odd thing is that if TSW4 doesn't outsell or remains flat to TSW3 wouldn't that be considered a failure? I mean if you're going to spend the cash to hype up a "new game" then wouldn't you want to increase sales? If remaining flat is acceptable then I would say just updating the core TSW2 year over year would have been the happier choice.

 

Well not neccessary. If you just updated the core game for free, then released these routes as regular add-ons or a route bundle, the overall number of purchases might have been smaller - as this way only people who really wanted these routes would have got them. On the other hand, currently many people bought them simply for TSW4 features or out of hype. So in the short them, this was a great money grab, even if less popular than TSW3 or TSW2.

On the long term however, this tactic scares away old customers and destroys your reputation. And the financial gains might be set back by the minimal maintanance you still need to do with the old versions (like releasing the patch for TSW3, still selling TSW3 DLC, etc).

 

Yeah makes sense. Just seems odd to me to p o old established customers driving them away for potentially new ones. Wonder what kind of numbers game they have going. Lose 15% of established customers and gain 17% new? 2% ahead! Good job Johnson, you get your bonus for the year.

 

I don’t know if remaining flat would necessarily mean the new games are the wrong approach or a failure. It would be disappointing for DTG and Focus if TSW doesn’t grow, whatever way they present the game to players.

The issues and number of bugs stays at a fairly constant level but there are features that are improving and in general I think the look is improving. It needs to create a bigger interest outside of railfans and I think they are heading that way by making it more accessible, or at least trying to. Focus say they want to increase marketing reach too. There is no better marketing to get new players than a new iteration of the game rather than an update to the existing one, and that seems to be the approach they are going for. The editor will help for the creators but short term shouldn’t increase player numbers too much just yet. Long term it should help grow TSW.

The new game approach is a pain for existing players with all the downloading and having to buy it if you don’t really want the routes it initially comes with and I think that will only get worse if players keep having to download and install increasing collections, or have to repeatedly buy content they don’t really want. This time it took me 9 hours to download all my DLC on top of the new stuff I got on early access and I am one of those players who didn’t mind paying for the new game because I wanted the new content.

I think from DTG saying how many services etc. had been played in the first week of full release that means it exceeded their expectations so I’d say they are currently feeling like they are winning.

 

That's an interesting take. I wondered why they plucked that very specific statistic out of the many possible data sets they could have chosen..
At least it gives us something to talk about

 

It's just PR thing. Throw out a huge number in order to create a better impression of the game's popularity and hopefully entice random Youtube viewers into making a purchase....the exact same thing they did with TSW3 when citing the tens of thousands of logins (or whatever it was) to livery designer.
Besides, if TSW4 was doing as well as that number implies then why the need to encourage community members into heading off to the Steam reviews page in order to make the ratings look a little more favourable?

 

I concur

 

Good point. It shows more people like the game, than hate it.

 

I think that's generally a given for any game. I mean unless you refund it, why would you keep playing a game that you truly hate?

 

It would have to be written from scratch. Most game engines just don't work for in-depth simulators. DTG have had a very hard time getting TSW working on Unreal, with the 4.26 issues being the primary instance of this. Unreal really isn't an engine for this type of game despite what DTG says. Railroads Online is on UE5 and still has various simulation errors with long consists, and while that game is very impressive in its own right it just shows the issues with this sort of thing.

With the idea of MSTS2 being an entire playable world like Flight Simulator, it's even more of a pipe dream to get it working on a general purpose engine.

 

"Unreal Engine has a very attractive set of technologies and more importantly, Epic Games is genuinely interested in servicing the simulation industry."

DR. ADAM EASTON

Founder, SimCentric Technologies

Cutting Edge Training & Simulation Software Platform - Unreal Engine

Maybe its not an UE issue..

 

i dont think that makes any sense though. 800,000 played services doesn't mean that the majority of people bought the game. the majority of who? it just means 800,000 services were played. what were the numbers for tsw3? what if tsw3 numbers were higher? it makes as much sense as saying 50 people walked in my tesco express so I must of made £247. how did you figure it out? how does that make sense? unless you compared it to another number its just a figure. it doesn't show a majority, nor a minority bought the game.

edit: neither does it show that people liked the game as well. people might have bought the game but hated it and will not buy any future DLC or products from dovetail. With a 65% rating on steam, compared to other games which many seem to have 80-90% and others much higher.

 

We can make an estimate of how many people played those 800,000 services … let’s estimate that the average service run is 35 minutes then 800,000 services would require 28,000,000 minutes or 466,667 hours or 19,444 days of running which would suggest 1389 people played the sim each day for 24 hours to reach that number in two weeks. Now let’s assume average person only has 3 hours to play in a day so that would be 11,112 people playing 3 hours a day for 14 days to reach that number.

Just a back of the envelope guesstimate, but not bad .. and assuming those that are dissatisfied have been posting here in the forums are about 100 individuals and probably represents less than 10 percent of those who are dissatisfied then of those 11,112 people who played , then 1000 where dissatisfied

Anyway all this is just conjecture, but is about as valid those saying the majority dislike the game … again with little supporting information to validate such claims … in fact that DTG and its predecessor companies have been producing Train Simulations for nearly 15 years or more sort of disputes such assumptions.

anyway.. enough of my musing … going to make another run on NY Trenton

 

The game hadn’t been out for 14 days by the time the number was posted even including early access. Also I don’t think an average player would be playing every day for three hours, the average play time would be much lower. The number of players will be much higher than 11,000. And yes, it doesn’t mean everyone was enjoying themselves while they were playing.

 

There are those on this forum that continue to play the older versions of game and ridicule the latest version. The newer version still runs better than the previous instalments, plus more content and features are available for it.
I just want to enjoy the game and be left alone. I don’t need these types telling me I’m stupid for buying the game or that I’m a DTG cash cow. I’m supporting a product that gives me satisfaction as a train enthusiast.

 

I agree wholeheartedly…. But I decided to go on the very conservative side of estimations so not to look like I was exaggerating the numbers… but the premise remains the same. Oh I am sure everyone that were running scenarios and timetables were perfectly miserable . But I have thoroughly enjoyed TSW 4

 

I think on the whole, TSW is a good franchise. It’s certainly not bad, but it’s certainly not great either.

I just wish DTG would be quicker at fixing the issues us players feedback and allow themselves more time to truly develop a route.

TSW could be a great franchise, I just don’t believe DTG has that vision. At least not the part of DTG driving its overall direction.

 

Being a rather casual player myself, 1-2 hours every couple of days, that figure of 800,000 seems impossibly huge, but then reading the forum, I get the impression that there are some youngsters who spend hours every day at the keyboard/controller. ( I hope they're doing their homework ).

What the median play time is is anyone's guess, though Sam said a few years ago that it was less than a half hour. How you square that with a round figure like 800,000 is a bit of a mystery, unless, as you say, there are a larger number of players playing for just an hour. or so a day.

Of course we don't know the origin of that 800,000 number. Not questioning it but maybe, having put it out there, someone from DTG might like to break it down a bit. ( Hint, hint ).

 

I think someone at DTG noticed it was quite a high number of services for the short time the game had been out and thought it would look good to the players too. People love high numbers. I know a lot of services in the three new routes are quite long, over an hour for standard services end to end, and NYT has some long services too. I would guess a lot of those quoted services would be the longer ones in those four routes. Maybe it is the kids who don’t like to go out when it is raining, although I do play for a few hours each day myself.

 

Screenshot from steam dB taken on my phone TSW4. Some of the estimations of total player numbers I'm seeing place the PC userbase as a rather small minority as a proportion of total users

 

What I am seeing is a subtle but definite trend of engagement by Matt and others to engage openly with some of the issues. I'll always choose to go with empirical evidence of positive change but as a statement of intent it's playing the right tune.

The big question for me if that is true is this-

Is there enough time and resource applied to fixing not just calamitous issues that should never have made it to release, but also quality of life issues that improve the product, while at the same time shovelling dlc out the door (with associated likely problems that need fixing themselves), before the product is abandoned as we have seen historically.

Numbers, assumptions and hypothesis can be thrown around all day. Empirical evidence of fixes, patch notes, quality increases etc are ultimately what will make or break consumer trust and brand reputation.

TSW4 to me feels a lot like a beta test for TSW5. That's this particular customers view. Its also why this particular customer is waiting before buying tsw4 or tsw5 if it all goes quiet again in 6 months.

I'm not a TSW junkie. I'm happy with tsw3. I will not spend money until I see a good reason for me that justifies buying into. Atm it feels like I'm just buying a slightly improved in some ways version of what I already own with a bunch of problems I don't want thrown in.

 

I have been on it most evenings but got to be honest after spending an hour or two wrestling with the editor earlier in the day, the temptation is to go off and play Snowrunner, Stray, or something else!

 

I hear you Vern. Especially when its updated regularly with actual patch notes..



Not bad for a one man band..

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/882140/view/3735230544069980497?l=english

 

then why did you come back to this thread. you made your first post on this thread around when it was made in august but you came back a few times since then. there are plenty of threads talking about the game in a positive light and alot better if you want to remain there. suggestions are also a nice place to be in. i dont think anyone is constantly following you about it

 

Well said!

 

I’d be interested to know what conversion method you are using to convert average concurrent players into total number of players. Hint… the average concurrent players is close to 1000 players at its highest point in the graph shown and above 500 further on. Another thing to take into account is that not all players play every day, as can be seen by the average dipping as players miss out play sessions or play for less time per session. They still own the game and therefore still count as a player, or at the very least DTG have their money. You will need to estimate how long each player is playing for and that can vary so an average has to be used. Hint… it’s probably not as long as you may think. And one thing to consider is that Steam players are a minority of players. Happy estimating, and happy multiplying.