Min-maxers one, Terra Nil
Yesterday I wrote about eco-strategy gameTerra Nil’s demo, which went gangbusters during last week’s Steam Next Fest and shot up into the top 50 most played games on Valve’s storefront. Well, turns out that might be at least partly down to a practice called badge-farming. That’s according to industry pundit Simon Carless’ latestGameDiscoverCo newsletter, anyway.
What’s happening here? Is it weird, or just an immediate flurry of interest after Steam Next Fest began last week? Carless rightly points out that Valve incentivised this Next Fest by offering badges, which levelled up higher the more demos any individual account holder played during the week. Badge XP maxed out after 10 demos but some people were playing hundreds of demos, even more than a thousand insome cases. Players were using third-party apps such asArchi’s Steam Farmto level their Next Fest badge automatically without having the games installed, or even the Steam client open.
Carless expands on the badge-farming explanation using the example of another demo from Next Fest beginning with Terra: Pavonis Interactive’s alien conspiracy 4XTerra Invicta. Stats show that 489,000 individual account holders played Terra Invicta’s demo, but around 250,000 of those did so for less than ten minutes. That seems more than a little odd. Carless advises devs not to be too chuffed if their game’s demo saw a lot more interest than they would’ve expected, putting it down to Valve’s gamification of Steam and the resulting shenanigans by some players to make numbers go up.
This might mean that fewer people than appeared played Terra Nil’s demo over the course of Next Fest, but I had a fun time with it nonetheless. It does seem to be generating afair bit of buzzamong denizens of Twitter too, and I don’t think the badge-farming hypothesis can explain that away. I see the sharp increase in concurrent players last Tuesday as probable badge-farming, but the second peak over the weekend followed by a shallower tail-off seems more like legit interest in the demo. We’ll have to see whether the game goes down as well when it’s eventually released.
Speaking of which, Terra Nil doesn’t have a release date yet. You can still play the demo onSteamfor yourself, if you’re environmentally minded.
