So in another thread there was a claim that I was hiding Naval AB’s secret success by leaving out the March figures, which were collected across the major update launch with significant naval AB changes. Major updates will also increase traffic, so I considered this less useful than the months clearly either side of that update, but some questioned this. And there was also a concern that the use of relative numbers, which is what any data analyst would do in this case, were hiding something sketchy. So hey, here’s the absolute stats for all three months we have, too.
I’ve divided the monthly stats by days in a month to get equal player-games per day and put the naval modes on a separate axis because at 1% of total games they’re hard to see.
What you can see here is that with March, and the new update (which came on March 18), total player-games increased (black line). On average across all modes, about 14%. Then after the update, they declined again, but overall the game hung onto some of those gains. This is very normal… exactly what a company wants to see from an update. They’ll go up again temporarily. with the June update buzz next month’s stats, I’m sure.
Naval RB (red) mostly tracked this, actually going up 32%, higher than average, but then losing 28% so it’s basically even or a little bit below where it was before, in both relative and absolute terms.
Naval AB (orange) on the other hand, actually rose more slowly than the rest of the game through the update period in March (+13%) and then also lost more ground (26%) compared to the average in April. they’re about 12,000 player games/day off today from where they’d been if they’d kept up with the average on this update. If we estimate the average number of players per game to be 24, those lost 12,000 naval AB player-games would equate to ~500 fewer full Naval AB games a day than where we would be IF Naval AB had tracked with the game overall. (In reality of course, there’s probably about as many games being played, it’s just those missing AB players have been replaced by Gaijin’s naval bots.) It is too early to say naval AB has permanently lost 15-20% of its playerbase just due to this recent update. But it certainly didn’t gain any new players by it.
BONUS ROUND: In case you were wondering which AB BRs were getting pummelled by RB the most, indicating a player switch to the other mode or withdrawal from play in favour of doing literally anything else with your free time, here’s a handy color-coded chart comparing April matches by BR to February, showing AB losing ground to RB after the update at every BR except 6.7-7.0.
Spoiler
In absolute numbers, 2817 more BR 6.7-7.0 player matches were played per day (or about 100 extra games worth of players per day world wide), but at 1.0-6.3 14723 there were fewer player matches per day (about 600 games worth) in April compared to Feb, amounting to an average 22% playerbase decline over just two months in AB if you leave out top tier.
