How helpful are private servers to player growth?

Help and Feedback Game Design Support
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#1

Recently our group game has gotten some traction but we have private servers disabled because we believe that if people play in private servers our player base wont grow, is this truly the case? What are the cases on enabling/disabling private servers?

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How helpful are private servers to player growth? (cont.)
#2

private servers are very important for players because they want to be able to do things that wouldn’t be possible normally inside the normal game (gamenights, admin commands, recording, etc.)

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#3

adding onto this-some players will try out a game in a private server before a public one, to get the hang of it (combat, for example) or to see what it’s about.

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#4

get creative… start investing… escape the matrix

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#5

Depends on the game. If the game is a milsim, combat, etc . Private servers are very important.

#6

For some of our fellow co-developers they feel that it’s a negative due to player’s joining and feeling left out since people appear to be “active” yet none are in public servers, though I get this sentiment is there any solid evidence of this being the case or not? We have bots for people to fight against on solo servers but is this really enough to keep people in if there’s no one to really fight against?

#7

No

If I’m right from the trailer, this seems to be an item asylum (or bloody battle, or infinite welfare, or randomizer, or random rumble, just so someone doesn’t attack me) type of game. If this is the case, please enable private servers as this may get your game to grow more, but here are reasons.

  1. Some people want to test items.
  2. It encourages content creation, especially from star creators or verified users, if that manages to happen.
  3. Some people want to chill with friends.
  4. Some people want to not get attacked every 3 seconds (applies to 1, 2, and 3) and can quite literally quit the game if there is no way to just chill and play
  5. Gamenights, minigames, community events
  6. Literally anything pointed out before this.

How big is the audience for your game exactly? If under 50, leave it off, increase server size, and set the behavior to fill each server as much as possible.

Bots are probably worse. It’s really a gamble but you’re better off with empty servers.

In case that one person invites a friend, you’re getting free engagement.

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#9