Declaring a game flop doesn’t necessarily mean that the game is bad, it means that it failed in aspects of reaching its right audience or just the company failed in a portion of marketing the game to the right audience. For example, prey was one of the best games of 2017 but just didn’t do well in sales and hence got declared as a flop. On the flip side, there are bad games that rightfully get flopped and review-bombed by players. On top of the list is “The Day Before” which is currently trending in the gaming community for all the wrong reasons and the company behind it filed for bankruptcy. So the case between a good game flopping and a bad game flopping is wide open. But what a game that was super popular but now is declining in popularity and player count.
So it’s called fading away. There are loads and loads of games that were once on the top of the gaming world, but no one even remembers their name and there are also games that are still popular but not as popular as they once were. like Warzone or Team Fortress 2, they had millions of players at any given moment not even having 100k on servers.
On the list of these games, One is Rocket League which was a really big hit once it was released and got bigger and better as the times moved. We went into the phase of the pandemic and online gaming just took off gaining any online titles from millions of players. But we are no longer in isolation and Rocket League is not as popular as it was before. So in this blog, I will be doing an analysis of Rocket League and we will get an answer: Is Rocket League a flop game?
We will be comparing the tournament’s viewership to the concurrent player count. So let’s begin.
Initial Phase And Peak:
So Rocket League was released in July 2015 and its rise to popularity was steady. The game was pay to play so anyone who wanted to play the game had to pay a sum to get into Rocket League. This was a good step because it prevented any non-serious player from getting into the game. A lot of players don’t waste their money on games that they don’t want to play. It also prevents trolling and a limit cheating because if you get caught doing shady stuff you will most definitely get banned. The initial phase of Rocket League was very good. It rose to fame but didn’t have an impact as big as Fortnite or Pubg did but it did create an e-sport scene for itself.
In the first of its release, the game peaked at around 400k concurrent players worldwide combining consoles and PC players.
If we talk about when Rocket League peaked in actual numbers and impact, then it is safe to say that it peaked when the whole world got into isolation because of the circumstances of 2020. The game peaked around September 2020 on Steam with a concurrent count of 146 thousand players. Now this number might seem low but remember it is only accounted for the PC players and not for Playstation and Xbox players where the most amount of players play the game.
Get a perfect rank for yourself:
In the list of the hardest games to get a higher rank Rocket League would be in the 3 or 4th place in that list. The reason is because the game is hard to learn and equally hard to be good at. Players get stuck on a specific rank. So the easiest way to get a perfect rank is to Get boosted in Rocket League. This way you’ll pay a sum of money to someone and in exchange he will boost your rank.
The silent decline:
Rocket League is still a very popular game with a firm player base who loved the game, but it is tough to deny that the game is losing its popularity. While I would not use the word flop for Rocket League the game’s charm has been fading away. He has not hit a single hundred 50k players in 18 months. The game’s decline is not something like the company did wrong or Rocket League has an issue, the only thing that makes sense for this silent decline is the game went free to play. How does that make sense? You might ask because a lot of games go free to play to gather or reclaim their lost fame but why that scheme did not work out for Rocket League, and I tell you why because other games that went F2P were from mainstream genres like first-person shooters or battle royals but as you know rocket league does not belong from a mainstream genre. It is a blend of two genres and that does not make sense for a lot of these free-to-play gamers. Hence, they tried the game they didn’t like, and they left. Leaving the game worse than ever before.
The firm fan base:
I will finish the blog on this. As you know by now Rocket League is on the decline but what you don’t know is that Rocket League still has its loyal and firm fanbase who are still playing and loving the game. If we talk about its impact or its popularity among e-sports fans, then here are some numbers for Rocket League’s annual championship. So the peak viewership was around 460k plus and the player count peaked at 42k on pc alone. The point here is that Rocket League is losing its popularity, but it is not a flop not yet!