ACC Playercount Round-up: June 2020
June 2020 was, unfortunately, the first time since September 2019 in which the player count saw a (slight) decline. It had to happen some time, since growth can’t be eternal (looking at you, capitalism). There are actual, good reasons for the decline in players which I will detail in this post, so read on if you’re interested to hear my hypotheses!
In this article I will analyze the playercounts from Assetto Corsa Competizione using data from both steamdb and steamcharts. I implement these into my own spreadsheets, making my own easy-to-read graphs.
June 2020
June started off the back of the free weekend held May 29th to 31st. Not a lot of the free players bought into the game, apparently, as at the start of June the numbers weren’t that much higher than before the free weekend (roughly 200). Back then, the numbers were already on a slight decline, a trend which we see repeated if we look at June overall.
The first ten days we see a quite even trend, but suddenly on the 12th we see a large dip (2,593), from which the count hasn’t recovered on the 13th of June (2,812), and a sharp recovery on the 14th (3,301). Then again a dip on the 19th (2,612) with another summit on the 21st (2,799). These were both friday’s, with a sharp recovery on sunday.
My guess is that what made people flock to the game is also what is causing these dips: in most EU countries, the lockdown is slowly lifting, meaning that a lot of people can have friday/saturday-night plans again instead of sitting at home, racing.
This slight dip in playercount is therefore nothing to be worried about, but is a natural correction that was always going to happen to the inflated quarantine numbers.
The month ends strong, mostly due to another influx of new players because of the Steam Summer Sale which kicked off on the 27th, bringing the numbers back to the 3000+ values from before.
2020 so far
Putting the decline into context, it doesn’t look that bad – to me at least. We’re still over double the playercount that we had in January. The free weekend came close to setting a new all-time record (which is still the 1.0 release day), and mid-May is still the best period we’ve had.
Judging the numbers on a weekly average, you can clearly see the decline in action, but you can also see that over the past three weeks (week 25 was 2,859, 26 was 2,849 and week 27 was on average 2,813 players peak concurrently) there is also some consolidation in the numbers, ofcourse helped a bit by the Summer Sale.
All time counts
It’s no surprise then, that the numbers went down a bit, for the first time since September 2019 (when average peak concurrent went down from 762 to 715). While a sudden downfall of 10% (while there was a 15% rise just the month before) seems dramatic, I think it was always going to happen once the lockdown starts to lift. The meteoric rise we had over the past few months was not a normal situation, so a correction was bound to happen.
This month, though, might finally see us break the all-time peak concurrent record. The GT4’s are coming, and they’re coming fast (this July). This will add a lot of value for some people, since we will most likely have to relearn a lot of what we know about racing on the tracks we have with these cars. They have less power, less aero and less grip. While slower, it doesn’t make them any easier to drive.
I’m really looking forward to being able to drive them and I reckon a lot of people feel the same. July might very well be the best month this game will see for a while, but we’ll see what happens. It’s going to be an interesting month, statistics wise at least!
Please let me know what you think of this write-up, and if you want to see anything added for next month’s write up!
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[…] Earlier this year, I wrote articles detailing the playercounts of Assetto Corsa Competizione. Due to a variety of reasons (limited time being the primary) I stopped writing those. However, I never really abandoned the thought of diving into the playercounts of Assetto Corsa Competizione to try and discern trends, whether positive or negative. So here we are with a round-up of five months. July, August, September, October and November. If you feel the need to catch up, this is where I left off: June’s round-up. […]
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