Two weeks ago, we've asked you to participate in our survey. Over 600 people did so! Thanks a lot for your effort, it's very helpful. We promised to share the results, so here they are!
We hope to learn something from this survey that would help us improve the game for both existing and future players. We think we can do that, but of course, there is a selection bias. Survey respondents are mostly people who already own the game and follow these blogs because they like the game. That's not a perfectly representative sample of either existing or future potential players, so these answers do require some interpretation.
Those who participated in the survey started playing the game at moments quite evenly distributed along the CS timeline. It's great to see so many people still with us from the original release date!
Many of these people have played the game for over 100 hours, which we are quite impressed by. The options for 0-30 hours are barely used. Nearly three-quarters of the surveyed players have played for over 50 hours.
The "achievement decline" is quite gradual, which is good in my opinion. There is a "gap" between starting outposts and using the glider launcher though. I think it wasn't that pronounced when only the first 30-80 people had answered the survey. Do we need a more accessible form of transport before glider launchers?
1 in 5 players has written a Steam Review. One third will never do so. Nearly half says they will do so in the future. Steam Reviews are much appreciated :)
Important sentences that were cut off: "I have participated in the 0.9.0 Beta" / "Videos on YouTube" / "Streams on Twitch"
It's interesting to notice that the most popular thing in this list is watching Colony Survival on YouTube. More than half of you have played CS in co-op with a friend, while less than 1 in 5 have joined a public multiplayer server. Nearly half of the surveyed players have used the Steam Workshop to download a mod, texture or world, which is a lot more popular than I expected!
Nearly half of you have joined our Discord, but less than half of that group is verified, which means the majority has never left a message on that Discord server. Another noticeable thing is the fact that less than 1 in 5 have participated in the beta - at a certain moment I was convinced that anybody semi-interested in 0.9.0 had joined it!
According to your judgement, 0.9.0 raised the game from a 7.3 to a 8.6. We're very happy with these numbers :)
Staying in Early Access for another couple of years is clearly the most popular option, but "5" is the third most popular option - indicating quite a lot of "neutrality". The option to leave Early Access a lot sooner is met with that same neutrality - "5" is the most popular option here.
1 = Complete disagreement, 5 = Complete agreement
Apparently, one of your main causes for enjoying Early Access is more and better updates. Influencing development is less important.
The majority of you doesn't think we necessarily need to stay in Early Access any longer because CS is not yet ready to be a "full release title". But a not insignificant group of 44.2% does advice us to improve the game more before leaving EA, and we'll definitely attempt that.
1 = Complete disagreement, 5 = Complete agreement
87.1% of our players doesn't believe we've been in Early Access for too long. I feel we can interpret these results as a vote of confidence. We don't have to stay in EA much longer, it's fine if we leave it, but it's also fine to stay there for a longer period.
Most of you don't view EA as a bad excuse to have low quality elements in games.
1 = Complete disagreement, 5 = Complete agreement
You've all got quite positive impressions of Early Access! You're not that worried about savegames breaking, and only 1 in 5 believes the label is unpopular and limits the growth and popularity of Colony Survival.
Of course, there's some bias in this answer. People who do have very negative opinions about Early Access, don't purchase and follow Early Access games! Now the question is, how many Steam users agree with you? If 4 out of 5 Steam users do dislike Early Access, that's a lot of players we're missing.
Insert Thanos-perfectly-balanced meme
The current price seems to be perfectly "in the middle". Nearly equally sized groups think the price is a bit cheap / a bit expensive.
Raising the price to 25 is still seen as perfectly reasonable or even cheap by a majority of surveyed players. 1 in 3 players does believe it's a bit much though. It's a tough dilemma: losing significant amounts of revenue because we're pricing the game too cheap is suboptimal, but losing revenue and potential players because the game is too expensive might be even worse.
We're strongly considering a 0.9.1 update which contains some new content and that finally raises the price to /$25.
There is a jetpack mod by Kenovis on the Workshop that allows players to re-activate personal flight without breaking achievements, at a significant in-game resource cost. We really like the idea, but it "just" uses the "flight cheat", it doesn't feel like a true jetpack.
We thought the jetpack would be popular because many people miss the personal-flying-without-breaking-achievements feature. It is popular, the majority rates it quite highly, but there's also a lot of voters rating it 1-5. It's the least popular idea in this part of the survey.
Boats in general score a lot better, but one specific young British man decided to artificially add 1000 fake votes, to indicate his disagreement with boats. To deter future tampering with surveys, his country has been ejected from the EU.
Blueprint builders are very popular. Portals/dimensions less so, but 10/10 is still the most popular options.
Inbetween those two options in terms of popularity are pipes/cables/conveyor belts. We're thinking about how to implement those!
One of the biggest problems I experienced during my own playthroughs of 0.9.0 was the invisible slow destruction of distant outposts. I expected the outposts-UI option to be more popular than the other options, but the reverse happened. The differences are small though.
1 = Content, 5 = Polish
A majority wants us to focus on polish this Winter, and on new content the rest of the year. That makes sense!
1 = Combat, 5 = Building
1 = More complexity, 5 = Quantity
You clearly voted to be more interested in better building than better combat! I hadn't expected that and since noticing these results I've been thinking a lot about how to accomplish that. That subject deserves at least a full Friday Blog!
More complex and detailed colonists were also less popular than I expected. But that's good - adding more detail there would be hard to do in Colony Survival I!
1 = Tutorials, 5 = Content
1 = 100% focus on singleplayer, 5 = Put some effort in the experience on public servers
A large majority would like to see us focus on content instead of tutorials. I do understand this, but we've got to keep in mind that surveyed players already own and play the game. Perhaps potential new players are hesitant because of the lack of proper tutorials, and solving that issue would be very worthwhile?
Only a small minority wants us to put some effort in improving the experience on public servers. I think we can conclude this mustn't receive a very high priority on our to-do-list :)
So, these were all the answers to all the questions in the survey. Were their any answers that surprised you? Are there things you'd like to add or explain? Let us know in the comments or on Discord!
Bedankt voor het lezen :D
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