Hey, I kind of have been looking through threads and saw a lot of “quitting”, “waiting for updates until then not playing” etc. I’d just like to give my two cents on it and clear things up for anyone confused, which from what I’ve seen many of you are. Now of course, this is just my analysis and nothing I say is 100% factual or guaranteed but I would say but I would also say, and many can agree with me that it’s more than likely this game won’t get an update, or new devs for that matter and will shut down on its due date. For those who don’t know, Pixel Worlds HQ is pretty much a rented Amazon owned space, where they have a contract on how long they can use it, as well as keep their servers active on it. From what I’ve been told, theres a total of 3 years paid in advance. As it’s already paid, I can see the game being up for those 3 years for Kukouri’s sake on making money back since it’s already been spent, but what I don’t see are them wasting any more of their budget on Developers when it won’t make them money anyways, which means no updates during the games runtime. Let me explain
Based off this, which is an accurate and reputable website that measures the amount of players that are online & playong in increments of 1 hour, there’s on average around halfway to a thousand players on, and I can bet you the majority of the 500 or so players don’t spend even a cent on the game - let’s be real too, who’s genuinely watching the ads for gems, probably near nobody so that’s a rare occurrence. PW’s peak was in 2020 with 1.3k players on at the same time. Now keep in mind, Growtopia’s average playerbase is 30x-50x PW’s peak (with bots accounted for, still. you get my point its a lot higher). Here’s the link to the website that shows how many pw players are on at a time if you’d like to take a look at it for yourself: Pixel Worlds - Steam Charts
To end this off, let’s talk about what we just talked about + development. Everyone and their mother knows by now Jake along with most of the developers quit to at least what they say: focus on bigger and better things, such as being recruited by a new company. There’s no developers or at least not enough at the current moment, right? No new content to be produced. People have assumed they can just hire new game devs and get back on track like it’s nothing, but labor at any capacity requires money to leave your pockets. Hiring a whole new team could cost 100k-250k would be my educated guess, and if you don’t believe me you can do research on that yourself. If I just talked about how they may lack funds to keep game servers up in the future, they for sure won’t have enough for the amount of devs they have to replace.
I think the only valid option I can see is them selling the game off to an indie developer who believes they’re capable of solo or duo developing the game themselves, similar to Seth and Hamumu for Growtopia back in the glory days. I say that’s the only valid option because, with the numbers I see, a decent game company wouldn’t see interest in buying pw out.
Also a PS, this is just a guess but I highly doubt all devs left at around the same time simply left for better opportunities, I 100% believe there was other problems that couldn’t be mentioned like reduced pay or something.
Anyways, if you learned something let me know. If you want to deny any of this and tell yourself your favorite game can’t die under any circumstance or something that’s cool too. Cya