Review counts bare little relationship to sales. If people are enjoying content they often don't come to leave a review or if they do, it's much later. Some of the most popular products have low review counts and this has been true since early TSC days. Achievements are problematic because the large proportion of TSW players don't care about achievements. I've not really seen any quality indicators from forums, reviews etc that relate to sales numbers at all to be honest. Matt.
It could be down to a gameplay perspective or access to reference material. There's a lot of factors that go into making a route. You sometimes won't always have to a specific year for the whole dlc.
That’s my point, if Dovetail mentioned that they were going to include all the updates to the mainline, I feel that players would be excited. I really feel that the third track and GCM would add to the true experience on the LIRR. Just my feelings…
Not seen it mentioned, but will New York - Treeton layer onto this, with Amtrak and New Jersey Transit. Thanks
I don't mind this being an extension rather than bringing a third track and GCM so much but I hope the new release at least feels and sounds like a suburb of a huge city day and night. The original is unusually lifeless for even a rural route, that it fees like NYC at the height of the pandemic is totally immersion-breaking for me.
That is definitely not the consensus in the games industry! Whether they care about achievements is irrelevant. They will unlock them either way if the achievements are of the "complete the tutorial" type.
It would honestly be cool if we can see these 190th anniversary decals on the M7 & M9 in game kind of similar to what you see on SEHS Class 395 Javelins
I rarely leave reviews, I don't think I have left any reviews for any train simulation products. Mainly because I never think about it and when I do it's inconvenient to do so. Maybe I'll make an effort to do so at some point.
The most users are dindt do that. Its like all these review websites only if there is something to complaining. Thats not always but mostly before i will get negative reactions
I know what I want to say but after taking my cat for a walk (yes, this really happens in rural England!) I can't for the life of me figure out how to put it into words so I'm going to have to agree to disagree with this one, I'm afraid. One thing that I am somewhat interested in though is: You can also have products that, through various pre-launch marketing techniques, sell incredibly yet for various reasons are deeply unpopular, so where exactly do they fit into your narrative? Financially successful and popular can be two entirely different things, you know..
I think certainly people are much more likely to leave reviews if they have a negative opinion about a product.
We can also be a bit cynical as each time a new version comes out, all the previous reviews of the DLC disappear. So what's the point of saying how awful Rapid Transit or Fife Circle are (or conversely how good BPO is), when the release of TSW5 more than likely in 4 to 5 months time will blank them out. DTG should work with Steam to ensure reviews of DLC that carry over into the next version are preserved.
Another factor, which DTG is privy to and we aren't, is active player numbers. Sony, Microsoft, Steam and Epic all keep running totals of who is logged on to what, and report the numbers to the publishers (ie DTG/Focus). So DTG has a very good idea of which routes get played and which don't. This, you say, doesn't matter, because once it's bought it doesn't matter if it's ever driven? Well, I suspect those numbers have a significant impact on what future routes get made, and which existing routes get reworked. As a hypothetical, the player numbers are high for Harlem, ergo a similar but underplayed route (LIRR) is selected for a makeover.
I would imagine if you are signed into Dovetail Live, that is gathering all the information about your playing habits.
Sorry i'm done! Better you read a page back and you understand the whole point... I don't know what you try to point out. Only what i say is that you can only get a good view how good a game is in selling you need complete numbers no reviews and other stuf! Matt have acknowledge that already.
It took them two routes and one loco DLC to decide to not go further with steam. The West Somerset Railway and Meissen branch were both worked on by individual developers in their spare time, and DTG at large only had a smaller contribution to the extensions. The extended SEHS to me seems like a way of getting out of making an entirely new British route for TSW3's launch, as it was a controversial route that needed work, but had three trains ready to go (even though all of them have problems that were not fixed). I don't think DTG internally consider it to be a route extension DLC, especially since it's free if you own the original, unlike LIRR 2. Then how exactly are there products with positive or overwhelming positive review scores on Steam?
Frightening!! They can probably tell which brand of coffee sits by my keyboard!! But then again we all know that there is almost no personal privacy in the world anymore. I can visit any location and the moment I get back home and switch on my computer/ phone/ tablet there they are, the ads from that very location even though I didn't buy anything.
As far as I'm aware, location services, if enabled, see where you have been and who you have near and try to target adverts towards you. I have cookies and tracking disabled on almost every website and app I use, and I use DuckDuckGo and other things that prevent trackers. Generally they work quite well, I almost never get adverts that are targeted at me (or at least what I'd expect to be targeted at me). Something my mum does as well is intentionally confuse the algorithm. This works best for politics, so if you like a left wing post, like a right wing one so the algorithm doesn't know what to do.
ACTUAL reviews from gaming websites or channels I lend some credence to but user reviews on a storefront are basically useless and usually boil down to people who can't figure out the game.
The ones I read are quite detailed on Steam and honest. It's not just leaving a negative review or not recommending something for the sake of doing so Also there are products that have positive reviews on steam so your comment is just false
How about claiming it’s not the consensus of the gaming industry? Where is your data to back that up?
Read the whole comment. I said most, not all. I go out of my way to leave positive reviews. I manage in a field where my guys hear nothing but bad news. It’s good to hear positive news sometimes is all.
I meant false as in the idea that everyone wants to leave negative reviews for games which just isn't true and most do take the time to leave a good review.
Ok, that's fair, and not the message I meant to convey, that's on me. My point was people are more apt to speak up when unhappy, then happy.
Here's a lot of articles and discussion on the topic: https://medium.com/@simon.nordon/100-days-of-steam-sales-analysis-aa28a183eedf https://vginsights.com/insights/art...-sales-ratio-how-to-estimate-video-game-sales https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/steam-sales-estimates-why-game-popularity https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/qb9gy3/new_article_how_to_use_review_to_sales_ratio_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/13pmidl/ratio_of_steam_reviews_to_copies_sold/ https://gameworldobserver.com/2022/11/15/how-to-count-game-sales-steam-2022-review-multiplier https://github.com/woctezuma/steam-reviews-to-sales https://www.valadria.com/steam-dev-cheat-sheet/ https://www.pcgamesn.com/steam/number-of-copies-sold
Not to mention if players are signed into DTL they have even more granular data on what gets played (even down to specific services i'd guess). They know more than any of us can deduce from other clues. Edit: OldVern beat me to it. Teaches me to read everything before replying lol
They haven't said anything about layers, wasn't mentioned in the articles and didn't hear them in the first look video so probably not. The timetable is also being reduced a lot for last gen and the series s even with only 2 trains which explains that it uses a lot of resources so an amtrak and njt layer would probably cause lots of problems
Not bad. Should have led with that in your original post.. Thanks for sharing. Will make for some reading tonight,
if I remember correctly they did a TSW Tracked at the end of the year, and had breakdowns of overall mileage, and by routes, and split by game, so it’s not far fetched to assume they collect data on everything, although the usefulness of specific service related data might be questionable.
I'd be very surprised if DTG don't have someone who is responsible for breaking down sales and user data for the management team. They likely also have sets of metrics to provide a glimpse of each DLCs "Value add" when compared to development costs. Most medium to large companies will have someone in that role and those user metrics will very much factor into the next several quarters of development and inform resource management too. Reviews are useful metrics too, but sales figures are still king. That's how most of the companies you buy products from operate.
The point is that if you don't have access to sales figures reviews provide a useful guide to sales figures.
You seem to be missing my point. If a review isn't honest in any way, which you wouldn't know, it isn't reliable. Just because something has X number of positive reviews, it doesn't mean anything if it was a dishonest review, which again, you would not know this when reading them.
If you want to read through every review and pick out the ones that aren't honest be my guest, not that it's even possible to do that. As a rule of thumb though it's fine to use it.
I think this is the problem with your argument- reviews DON'T provide a useful guide because there's no way to statistically tie the amount of reviews left for a product to the amount of that product sold. If we had a "universal review coefficient" of, "X% of all buyers leave a review", then your method would work great, but we have no such metric. At best, the number of reviews establishes a "sales minimum" for a title, but it tells us nothing beyond that. Even that's a little hazy because you'd have to filter out ones where the reviewer received a copy for free. I think we have to admit that DTG knows what sells and what doesn't. And really, there's not much of a business case for them to be dishonest about it: "We'll tell them X/Y/Z sold poorly, when they really went gangbusters, that'll show those forum know-it-alls!"-Purportedly Evil DTG exec Really think about that for a minute and imagine how that could possibly help their bottom line.
I am not missing your point. It's just that your point is irrelevant, because "dishonest" reviews on Steam still come from people who bought the product. I see you have completely ignored the articles and social media threads I linked. Obviously I can only make guesses as to DTG's actions. But it is definitely helpful for them to spin around criticism by blaming it on the playerbase instead of them.
Just because they've bought the product, doesn't mean they like it. They could easily say the opposite, no one would know the difference.
That the number of Steam reviews can be used to estimate how many people on Steam have bought a product.
