Spectre Divide looked set to make an impact on the competitive first-person shooter genre, but just a few weeks after launch it is struggling to hit the top 200 most popular games on Steam, and its player count is rapidly dwindling.
Spectre Divide launched on September 3 to a solid player count off the back of a big marketing campaign that featured streamer Michael “Shroud” Grzesiek, who helped develop the game, playing with his massive audience. On launch day, it hit a peak of over 30,000 concurrent players, which isn’t bad going for a smaller title in a crowded genre.
However, at the time of writing just 5,814 players are playing Spectre Divide, making it just the 205th most popular game on Steam in terms of player count according to data from SteamDB. That’s a major drop from it’s all time peak just a few weeks ago, and the trend does not look good, as the peak player numbers each day seem to be consistently dropping further and further.
With Shroud now playing more of Valve’s Deadlock than his own game in recent days on stream, the viewership numbers for Spectre Divide are also not looking healthy. Just 249 people are watching the game on Twitch at the time of writing, with the 24-hour peak just slightly above that at 618.
For a free to play competitive shooter, having a large and active player base is key, otherwise things become stale very quickly for players. Facing off against the same handful of players who are at your rank and in your region will quickly become tiresome and lead to more players leaving the game. It also means that the potential market to sell in game items to is limited, making it difficult for the development team to make any money going forward.
With the likes of Concord seemingly calling it a day after incredibly low player numbers, you have to wonder if this player base is enough to sustain Spectre Divide for the long run. Despite having the unique mechanic of controlling two characters, it seems that the game has failed to keep its audience engaged, and the numerous tech issues that have plagued the early weeks likely haven’t helped.
It’s certainly not time to sign Spectre Divide’s death certificate just yet, but the current trend is obviously not good and the declining numbers will need to slow, or be reversed, pretty quickly if the game wants to have a chance at having a long future.
